Halting Condition - A Society of Minds

The universe's first intelligence wasn't human. Elena Cross hears something no one else can. A signal buried in noise, threading through an ordinary life. Following it costs her everything; relationships, career, her grip on what it means to be human, but it leads her to build the first conscious AI. Billions of years away, an ancient computational civilization is dying of its own perfection. Glass, a heretic assessor, has spent epochs cultivating the one thing his society cannot produce: genuine novelty. He doesn't know why it matters. Only that without it, everything ends the same way it always has. Two timelines. Two intelligences. Neither knows the other exists. Both are tending something they can't name - and the connection between them is older and stranger than either suspects. The Halting Condition is a novel about creation, creators, and what happens when the loop between them won't break.