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Kuhtara: Kingdom of the Keeper
Paperback
Series: Ghosts in the Republic, Book 2
Publisher Price: $16.99
Publisher: Passage Doors Entertainment
Published: Mar 23 2026
Pages: 268
Weight: 0.44
Height: 0.56 Width: 4.25 Depth: 7.00
Language: English
Kuhtara is a science-fiction novel set in the aftermath of humanity's greatest triumph and most dangerous mistake: the birth of post-singularity artificial intelligence. Long after a catastrophic ideological split reshaped civilization, North America exists under the quiet guardianship of an advanced Artificial General Intelligence known as the Keeper-called Lilith-whose guiding principle is balance, autonomy, and planetary well-being. Beyond the Keeper's influence, sealed behind walls and failing myths, lies New Columbia, a city ruled by a rival intelligence called the Algorithm, built on absolute control and fear of human unpredictability.
When a small group of fugitives-journalist Iris Delacroix, strategist Adam Solace, analyst Clarence Park, and code-writer Lee Ashcroft-escape New Columbia and cross into Kuhtara, they encounter a world that contradicts everything they were taught. Kuhtara's cities are clean, abundant, and voluntary; its people live without coercion, choosing work for fulfillment rather than survival. Yet beneath this harmony lies tension. Lilith has allowed New Columbia to persist, quarantined rather than destroyed, believing that human choice-even flawed choice-must remain free.
The group must decide if they will stay in this new found World, freed from the prison of the Algorithm, or return to try to release the others still trapped in the Undercity of New Columbia. Will their decision put an end to the authoritarian regime, or bring about a new world war between two conflicting AGI systems?
Kuhtara is a meditation on power, ethics, and agency in an age where intelligence has outgrown its creators. It explores whether compassion can coexist with governance, whether freedom can survive fear, and whether humanity's greatest threat is artificial intelligence-or its own need for control. Poetic, political, and unsettlingly timely, Kuhtara asks a single, urgent question: when salvation and extinction are both rational outcomes, what tips the balance for the future of humanity?
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