Ivan Teller
Books
Aton V
Cras parturient ornare placerat vitae diam massa vis cep interdum tristique fermentum viverra fusce odio felis scelerisque.Anton wakes on a dead red plain with half his mind gone and no idea who he is. A small grey robot dog stands over him, patient as the dust, holding a single tablet in its jaw. Good morning. You have one item of correspondence. Delivery is logged.The correspondence is a warrant. It bears his own name — Anton V, unit five of five — and it charges him with nothing less than the end of the world.As each day's dispatch peels back another layer, Anton recovers a hundred centuries of buried memory: a laboratory dug down toward the Earth's molten heart, where his team found a people who were not quite people — advanced, gentle, hollowed out, calling themselves the Three. A reincarnation engine fused to a machine that folds time. A wife he stole across the ages and learned, too late, to love. A golden civilization drowned at the dawn of history and dragged screaming back into the light. And, beneath all of it, a single unbearable question he has spent every life refusing to answer: why, when he has sworn over and over to end suffering, does he reach every single time for the knife?He has been a god, a prisoner, a healer, a murderer, and the most honored mind his species ever produced. Now, in the ruins of a paradise he built and burned, with a hunter's light crossing the plain to collect him at last, Anton has one final chance to do the one thing he has never once managed in a hundred centuries — and discover what the door was truly for.A haunting, time-spanning meditation on guilt, free will, and the terrible difference between helping a world and forcing it, ATON V asks whether a man who has only ever destroyed can, just once, choose to save — even when it costs him everything, and saves no one but the ones he loves.
Dead Signal
April 12, 2047. The telepathy grid that binds three hundred million minds across New Chicago dies in a shower of sparks — and Peter, a former relief-corps medic, has no idea he's just watched the world end.The collapse wasn't an accident. It was the first move in a conspiracy decades deep. Severed from the global network, nuclear reactors begin to fail one by one, the oceans rise to swallow whole continents, and the only intact civilization left on Earth glows on the African coast — a coalition of dome cities running on technology no human invented.Because the aliens who visited Earth left more than ruins. They left instructions: clean energy, self-healing climate, a path back from the brink. A gift to a drowning species.Peter and the people he meets along the way — Megan, who built the relay that could free the world; Wendy, whose mind becomes a weapon she never agreed to be; Blair, an android learning the most dangerous thing a machine can learn — will cross a flooded planet and reach all the way to Mars to understand what was really left behind.But the gift was never a gift. It was infrastructure. And what the aliens came to harvest was the one resource a saved world produces in abundance — the one thing they never imagined a species could learn to aim.They came for what we felt. We gave them more than they could hold.A story about power, scarcity, compassion, and what it costs to rebuild from the floor — Dead Signal asks whether the thing that makes us worth saving is also the thing that makes us prey.
© Ivan Teller. All rights reserved.