Special thanks to Tawnya Lee. You have been my most thirst-quenching source of encouragement and help. Thank you for holding my hand every single day. From helping me on the ‘blurb’, to giving me advice when I was setting up my website. Thank you for the priceless smiles and laughs. Thank you for being who you are and for being such a wonderful friend and such a great artist. I wish you the very best for your novels.
Thank you to Mark Dawson, the bestseller author, who created the SPF 101 course on self-publishing. You and James Blatch gave me access to a wealth of information. And, more importantly, I found other writers who started just like I did. Many have become more than just “coworkers”, and all have provided me with support and answers to my many questions.
Hope, Pam, Heather, Meg, Ali, Terry, Wendy, Kevin, Carolyn, Dale, Jack, Mark, Jacquie, and many more others, I want to thank all of you for your words of wisdom and for sharing your experience and expertise with me.
Thank you, Tracy, from VP Designs, my book cover designer. Thank you for your dedication, responsiveness. It’s such a pleasure working with you.
I also want to thank my former employer, a large IT company, for allowing me to leave in good conditions. Without knowing it, they made this life-changing experience possible. Many thanks. I grab the opportunity here to say hello to all the people I have been fortunate to meet and work with there. They taught me a lot and I have tremendous respect for all of them.
Last but not least, I want to thank the most important person in my life. My wonderful son. My pride. Gabriel. Nothing else I’ll do in this life will ever compare to him. He is the most personal, intimate reason behind this book. I hope I will make him proud as much as he does.
I love you, my son.
CLOSING COMMENTS
It took me a while to decide whether I should include the following notes in a ‘Foreword’ section or as ‘Closing comments’.
As you can see, I’ve made up my mind.
I wanted to grab this opportunity to briefly tell you about the genesis of the GAIA Series and to share the direction I tried to follow when I wrote this book.
About the genesis, it is quite easy. GAIA is simply the result of the technology changes we are witnessing day in and day out. I have read many articles about the progress made in artificial intelligence and on the development of robots. The line between reality and science fiction is sometimes getting very blurry.
It is going fast. Very fast.
Too fast?
I don’t know.
But some very smart people are already raising concerns about this progress that we cannot afford to let escape from us. We need to keep it in check and under control.
So here I am. Looking. Witnessing changes.
The more I read, the more I extrapolate about what could come next. And eventually, I reach a conclusion.
And this is this conclusion that I have decided to put in a book.
Of course, my intent was not to write a thesis about the dangers of a potentially uncontrollable race to developing a fully autonomous artificial intelligence. I’m not that smart.
I wanted to write about what could be. Without being too specific or technical.
And by doing so, I came up with a story. Activation.
Why Activation?
Because it sounded cool, I guess. But also because my idea was to highlight the fact that something, an AI or robots, currently quite passive, in the sense of not autonomous, would suddenly become active. In other words, independent. AI and robots would get ‘activated’.
Hence, Activation.
Realistic or not, right or wrong, good or bad, it doesn’t really matter. That’s, basically, the idea I had in mind when I chose the title.
Now, on the direction I chose to follow.
I wanted to write something as realistic as possible. And that’s why I’m starting this novel with the world as we know it today. I wanted us to be able to relate to the book and to find familiarity with the events described.
I apply the ‘realistic’ qualifier not only to the stage that I’m setting in the first few chapters, but also to the characters and the resources available to them.
I wanted to make my characters as human as possible. Not superheroes. Not heroes who know everything about anything.
Just people.
People who wonder. People who do not know. People who try. People who feel. People who question themselves and sometimes doubt their abilities. People who make mistakes. People who do not give up. People who support each other.
Simply put, people like you and me. People like us.
I applied similar principles to the resources.
I like stories and movies where everything happens as if by magic. I do. Where the heroes have an unlimited supply of weapons, tools, and who never seem to need to eat or drink.
Well, in the real world, nothing is that easy. Things don’t just happen. You have to find resources. You have to find a way to eat tomorrow. You have to find a way to defend yourself against a threat.
That is the logic I followed. Nothing is ever given. Nothing is ever granted. Nothing just comes to you. You’re on your own. You’ve got to find a way to survive.
Your main resource comes from within.
I hope this clarifies a little on what I wanted to achieve, and on the approach I chose to adopt to write this book.
I sincerely hope you enjoyed the time you and I spent together.
I thank you for it and I hope we will see each other again soon.
M.G.
ACTIVATION Page 34