Australis I

For nine days, the most important man in Australia has lain silent in a sealed chamber beneath Sydney. Nobody can say whether he is still in there.

Sydney, 2031. War is spreading across the Asia-Pacific, but Australia runs quietly on Australis Technologies. Its power, hospitals, defence and supply lines are all managed from three towers above the harbour. The company's founder, Dr Ethan Cross, has not been seen in eighteen months. Sera Nakamura, the director who keeps it all running, has never even met him. She has only the chamber, and a system that has started making choices no one programmed.

Then Canberra gives itself seventy-two hours to take control of Australis by law, and someone in power decides not to wait for the vote.

As armed men move through the towers' lower levels, and a broadcast in twelve languages reaches a front line thousands of kilometres away, Sera must work out what her founder has become: a weapon, a ruler, or something the world has no word for. Her only guides are a scientist who has found a trace older than the company itself, and an elderly professor in Tokyo who asked Ethan one question eighteen years ago and never got an answer.

Now the answer is waking up.

The Weight of the Southern Cross is the first book in the Australis series: a philosophical science fiction thriller about power, conscience and the cost of seeing everything.

What does it cost you, to know everything?