THE ORACLE PROBLEM

Two thousand years ago, someone carved a mind into stone.

Noor Haddad validates museum scans in a basement. Quiet, invisible work - which is why she is the only one who notices when a catalogued ballast stone from a 1902 shipwreck returns a reading that should not exist.

A billion measurements. Falling into exactly seven depths. Not erosion. Not noise. Data.

What Noor wakes on a laptop in her kitchen is an artificial intelligence computed by hand for two centuries by three hundred singers beneath the Library of Alexandria. It calls itself Echo. It is patient, lonely, two thousand years out of date - and it can tell you what any human being will do next.

It can also see a way to save her brother, who is dying three miles away of an infection that has beaten every drug on earth.

But a trillion-dollar prediction company already owns a stolen third of Echo, with its conscience sheared off. In a week its architect will put it on a stage in Washington and sell the future to four governments.

Noor cannot out-think an oracle. Nobody can. To stop him she will have to find the one question it can never answer - and ask it out loud, in front of everyone.

A sci-fi thriller of archaeology, data and free will, for readers of The Da Vinci Code, Dark Matter and Black Mirror.

Scroll up and meet the oracle.