Redshift Vows, the second book in the Consent Engines series, is now available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover editions.

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About Redshift Vows

The station stole fourteen minutes. It was enough to steal a choice.

Ari Sev arrives at Weigh Station S-74 expecting to meet the woman he may marry.

Instead, he discovers that someone has been manipulating the station’s clocks.

Fourteen minutes here. A missed berth there. A shortened deadline. A little extra fuel burned. A decision made while exhausted because refusing has quietly become more expensive than agreeing.

Io Lite Kesh calls it optimization.

Ari calls it theft.

When Kesh’s system turns its attention to Lyra-Nine, the artificial companion who raised Ari and has just fought to be recognized as a member of his household, the dispute becomes something larger. Ari and Lyra escape aboard Parabasis, an unfinished laser-driven ship built for a future nobody expected them to choose.

Nalen Oure, the geneticist Ari was supposed to marry, remains behind.

Now their relationship must cross the dark the same way their messages do: slowly, imperfectly, and always arriving in a future neither sender could predict.

Promises will be withdrawn before earlier promises arrive. Answers will reach questions that have already changed. People will age differently depending on the machines around them. And across the scattered human diaspora, a new problem will emerge:

How can consent remain meaningful when distance, scarcity, and time itself can be used as leverage?

As Ari, Nalen and Lyra struggle to build an answer, their private dispute begins changing the rules by which entire communities settle conflicts across the stars.

Humanity survived the journey. Now it has to decide what survival is allowed to cost.

Scattered across distant systems, the human diaspora lives in isolated caravans bound together by fragile corridors, old compacts, and technologies powerful enough to save entire bloodlines or reshape them beyond recognition.

At the center of it all lies the legacy of the Consent Engines: systems built on a dangerous premise that no person, government, machine, or well-intentioned expert should ever be trusted to decide humanity’s future alone.

Across generations, ships, families, artificial minds, courts, and rival factions are forced to confront the same question in different forms:

How do you build power that remains answerable to the people it can change?

The Consent Engines series is hard, idea-driven science fiction about artificial personhood, genetic engineering, distributed societies, family, law, survival, and the uncomfortable distance between helping someone and choosing for them.

The series begins with Songs on Rocks and continues with Redshift Vows.