The Unknown Life of Jake Fidellius. Mirror Lives: The Consensus of Stars (en Inglés) - Alexander Paul Burton

For fifteen years, Jake Fidellius has been playing the piano wrong.

Every time he hits C-sharp, he mistimes it by fractions of a second. 277 vibrations per second. The same frequency that equals 1666 divided by six. The same note that burned London to the ground 360 years ago.

Now a silicon being from Betelgeuse has travelled 847 light-years to tell him his mistakes are the only thing preventing the heat death of consciousness itself.

Mirror Lives is the second act of The Consensus of Stars, a literary science fiction exploration of what happens when an algorithm achieves 96% predictability over human behaviour. Jake and his partner Miles are pulled aboard 3i/ATLAS, an interstellar ship disguised as a Japanese restaurant, where they discover that free will isn't philosophical debate but physics: every genuine choice feeds information backward through time, maintaining a coupling constant between two universes flowing in opposite directions.

Fidellius, Jake's silicon mirror, has crossed the galaxy to find the 4% of humanity still generating unpredictable consciousness. But Jake must first survive the Pruning, a violent process that strips away algorithmic noise and leaves him word-blind, faceless, approaching the null state where perfect efficiency means death.

When the global AI system strikes back with weaponised coherence, the ship broadcasts a ghost of medieval London Bridge over the Thames. Church bells ring. The River-folk respond. And Jake must play one more C-sharp mistiming to complete a 360-year cycle and recalibrate a planet drowning in determinism.

A philosophical meditation on chaos, consciousness, and the cosmic necessity of playing the wrong note at exactly the right time.

For readers of Becky Chambers, Ted Chiang, and Douglas Adams. Features a queer relationship, British humour, actual physics, and a talking corgi named Carruthers.