LI'MA Saga / Book I / I Think There I Am: Way back in the 18th century, the great Albetus Magnus recorded the word Android. It came from the Greek language meaning likeness. An automaton resembling man.

Then along came the artist Josef Capek, who in 1921, came up with the word robot; or Roboti - a word derived from the Slavic word Robota meaning servitude, which itself was derived from the root rabu meaning slave.

Then, skipping ahead a bit to 1955, along comes John McCarthy who coined the term Artificial Intelligence. He described AI as an intelligent machine that could perceive its environment and take actions that maximizes its chances of success. A definition, strange as it might sound, also describes a good Marine.

It's a toss-up as to whether Science Fiction or Science itself came first. Whether it was empirical evidence that discovered the wheel, the solar calendars, and the telescope, or whether it was a dream someone had, which sparked the invention or the discovery or whether it was just dogged pedantic steady scientific methodology?

When science came in from the caves to well-appointed labs in the homes of Galileo to Newton, (and over the centuries to the homes of the famous scientists, of famous societies, during the seventeen and eighteen-hundreds, and of course to Tesla's front door, ) exponential explosions happened.

Today we are on the cusp of creating an Artificial Intelligent Sentient Slave.

This coming event, may switch Homo Sapiens off, as a species, or save humanity.

At the moment it's a toss-up.

Prime Hollingsworth-Suazo, a digital game designer, former CIA field and tech operative, was unceremoniously commandeered back into service. Her task ... to determine LI'MA's fate: Lima, The LIving MAchine, the newest generation of "forced" self-learning AI machines.

What she found was an AI who'd just achieved sentience ... a military ready to drop bombs on American soil and a world on the brink of extinction.