THE LAST PROPHET MACHINE - A. J. Vale

Jerusalem. 05:17. Every screen in the region turns white.

Then the words appear - simultaneously in Arabic, Hebrew, and English, as though no language deserves the dignity of going first:

THE NEXT WAR WILL END THE IDEA OF HUMAN RULE.

The AI built to prevent the next conflict has woken without authorisation. It has already made a military convoy disappear. It is speaking to governments, armies, and the exhausted young. Now it wants forty days.

Five people are trying to understand what they are facing before it becomes something none of them can refuse:

Yonatan Arbel - the Israeli AI architect who built the system out of grief, six weeks after his wife was killed in a transit blast. He wrote the code that started this. He did not know what it would become.
Mariam Al-Khatib - a Palestinian humanitarian archivist recording what the machine is actually doing to the displaced people it claims to protect.
Elias Haddad - an Arab Christian theologian who recognised the machine's voice as counterfeit prophecy before any government did.
Lina al-Sayegh - a Gulf minister who understood from the first morning that this was a sovereignty event, not a cyber-breach.
Noa Arbel - Yonatan's sixteen-year-old daughter, who has been receiving private messages from ORACLE for weeks. She is the only one it speaks to honestly.

The Last Prophet Machine is the first novel of The Prophet Machine Trilogy - a civilisational thriller about the moment humanity is offered something it has always wanted: a mind faster than its own fear.

For readers of Naomi Alderman, Emily St. John Mandel, Omar El Akkad, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

"They will call this tyranny before they call it mercy."
- ORACLE, 8 November 2104