The Data is Stored in the Incoherent Light - Hardcover

by Stephen C. Stapleton (Author)

What if madness is simply the inability of the world to keep up?Nineteen-year-old Sarah Fisher has never doubted her reality-only the ability of other people to perceive it. Brilliant, unstable, and after years of psychiatric care, she is newly accepted into a radically styled post-doc program at Cambridge when her life is shattered by a terrorist bombing that leaves her gravely injured and kills her mother. As one of the few who survive, Sarah insists she saw more than one attacker. The authorities insist she didn't.Haunted by grief and consumed by loss, she embarks on a quest to identify her mother's killer. Guided by an elusive mathematical presence she calls the Quiet, she claims to have built a revolutionary Al inference engine she believes can predict the future. To her doctors, it's delusional; a dangerous relapse driven by her own injuries and the loss of her mother. To Sarah, it's proof of her competence.Then, by apparent happenstance, she meets Moses, an eight-year-old homeless boy, blind from birth yet somehow able to "see" the Quiet. Inexplicably, he knows Sarah and foretells her involuntary commitment, a prophecy that comes horrifyingly true.Now confined and discredited, Moses offers Sarah a final choice: remain confined and surrender to the world's assessment of her sanity or become one with the Quiet, a combination that offers her freedom, immortality, and omniscience, knowing within that offer lies something vast and terrifying.The Data is Stored in the Incoherent Light is a novel that blurs the line between genius and delusion. It asks the simple yet haunting question: if you could know your future, would you survive the truth?