“Nicky’s Fire not only teaches the reader about the excitement and camaraderie of a fire department, but it delivers an engaging story of the importance of family and friendship.” –Sublime Book Review

Nicky and his father were never close. Nicky was afraid to ask his dad for anything. For career day at Nicky’s school, he is required to write a report on what his parents did for a living. With much coaxing from his mother, Nicky went to work with his father for one day.

Nicky’s father, Steve, was a New York City firefighter and Nicky witnessed the inner workings of the firehouse. This was his lucky day because Ladder 52 was ordered to The Rock for training and Nicky went with them. Nicky saw how the Probies trained to become firefighters.

On the way back Ladder 52 is called to a fire and Nicky discovers firsthand the controlled chaos on the fire ground. Steve puts the ladder to a third-story window and disappears into the smoke. The scene deteriorates fast as the building collapsed and Steve is nowhere to be seen.

Restorative Human Medical Care Unit 7435, sentience level fifty, is happiness level five out of ten to serve and heal the human master it loves. But Unit 7435 finds there is a price to be paid for love… and for failing in its primary mission.

Restore  is a standalone short story that takes place in the world of the Singularity novels.

Start the novel series with The Legacy Human (Singularity 1).

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
The future is… unsettling.

Technology isn’t just racing forward, it’s accelerating. This isn’t just our imagination, it’s a natural consequence of innovation building upon innovation. The gap between what we can imagine and reality shrinks every day. Our relationship with technology is already one of the defining issues of the 21st century. As we integrate it ever-more-intimately into our lives and bodies and brains—as we mold our creations in our own image, not only physically, but mentally and emotionally—our tech will shape us in ways we will barely understand.

The 21st century will challenge us to remember what it means to be only human.

But creating a truly sentient Artificial Intelligence is far more complicated than first dreamed in Asimov’s Bicentennial Man. As we learn more about the three pounds of meat and electricity between our ears, as well as consciousness itself, we are realizing how difficult the job is. In a sense, creating an AI will force us to answer some of the deepest questions humanity has ever asked… about ourselves and our place in the universe.

What does it mean to create intelligence if you intentionally limit it? Is it cruel or compassionate to keep your tech from evolving above a certain sentience level?

“Edgy, steamy, action packed, and plotted with nail-biting tension…”–Library Journal, Starred Review

In the harsh Northern Waste where human life is worth little, ice trucker Raina Bowen has learned to keep her eyes open and her knife close at hand. She’s spent her life on the run, one step ahead of the megalomaniac who hunts her. All she wants is to stay out of trouble and haul her load of grain to Gladow Station—but trouble finds her in the form of a sexy stranger called Wizard. He has the trucking pass she needs, and she has to drag him out of a brawl with the very people she’s trying to hide from in order to get it.

She may have rescued him, but Raina’s not foolish enough to see Wizard as anything close to helpless. He’s hard and honed and full of secrets—secrets that may destroy them both. As they race across the Waste, trying to outrun rival truckers, ice pirates, and the powerful man bent on their destruction, Raina’s forced to admit that trouble’s found her. And this time, there’s nowhere left to run.

“One of the best books I’ve read in ages.”–Marjorie M. Liu, New York Times bestselling author

A unique and intimate memoir about adoption, prejudice and shared destiny, thousands of miles from home.For years Ruth Spira never even dreamed of motherhood and children. She was left a young widow when her husband was killed in Israel’s Yom Kippur war in 1973, and she chose not to remarry.

At the age of forty something began to stir within—the desire to become a mother made itself increasingly heard with each passing day. Her age and the decision to stop long and draining fertility treatments, eventually lead her to the other side of the world – to Vietnam.

In an honest and moving book, Ruth describes the process she went through—from the moment she decided to adopt, through the difficult months she spent in Vietnam, the immediate connection between her and her new baby, Lien, and the process of acclimation back home, along with other hurdles she encountered.

This extraordinary book raises important and essential questions about parenthood, cross-border and cross-culture adoption, single motherhood, prejudice, racism, the role fate plays in our lives and the inexplicable feeling of love a parent feels for her child.