Ultramarine

In a drowned, overheated Pacific, everything reaches you through the interface: work, love, grief, God—all of it machine-translated, ad-supported, and paywalled mid-sentence. Marin Bucea, an ex-cop, current mop jockey, and native of a small Romanian town he can’t afford to return to, is one lapsed subscription away from becoming an illegal. So he takes the only contract on offer: Security Coordinator aboard the AMT <i>Meriam</i>, a cargo ship crewless by design, run by an AI that is polite, patient, and impossible to out-argue.

The last jobs left for humans, Marin knows, are the ones where somebody has to die. Or clean. He was hired for both.

He ships out with a hangover and a one-shot gun printed by an old flame in the smugglers’ warren beneath a Davao arcology. A novel in three movements—Alienation, Violence, Isolation—footnoted by the very software in its hero’s skull, <i>Ultramarine </i>moves from corporate purgatory to open-ocean siege to something older and stranger: the sea itself, indifferent to every intelligence yet devised, human or otherwise. B.

Traven’s <i>The Death Ship</i> rewritten for the algorithm age, Ultramarine is a novel of furious comic energy and real sorrow—a book about the last man in the loop.