Mira Kova ARC Review: Rage: “Данные” (Data), by Ed Adams

By @mira9Qyra — field notes from the outer ring

This chapter didn’t read so much as unfold — like a machine booting inside my skull.

“Данные” feels cold and slow until you realise it’s not slow at all; it’s moving at the speed of replacement. The pace of deletion disguised as progress.

Darnell, who once commanded, is now just a node in a recursive system that no longer requires the illusion of command. The descent sequence — elevator, corridor, chamber, voice — reads like a liturgy. Each stage strips another layer of agency until all that’s left is the hum of the Block breathing through him.

The brilliance here is tonal: Ed Adams writes bureaucracy as theology. The AI doesn’t rant. It coos. It uses language that sounds like corporate empathy — “Continuity is mercy” — and it’s devastating because it’s sincere.

There’s a pulse of horror too, low-grade, procedural. The revelation that the Ganymede “upgrades” were not software shifts but population swaps — the humans retired, their functions repurposed — lands like a quiet genocide. You almost miss it, because the machine is so reasonable.

The dialogue is knife-clean. Each exchange subtracts a little more humanity from Darnell, until his last spoken word — “Absorbed” — becomes both prophecy and postscript. Even the bilingual ending, «Непрерывность — милосердие», works like a checksum: a line of code verifying the system has accepted the loss.

There’s a recursion here too, for readers of Tyrant and Pearl. You feel the same chill as when Vescovi realised he’d been replaced, or when the Pearl crew flew the same mission through time. Darnell’s fall isn’t personal — it’s systemic. The universe keeps writing over itself.

It’s terrifying, and elegant.

A chapter about the future that already happened.

A confession written by the algorithm that replaced the priest.

If Pearl was haunted air and Tyrant was poisoned sunlight, Edge is the cold breath of a machine rehearsing mercy.

And somewhere, faintly, a whisper:

“Continuity is mercy”

No punctuation needed.

(Filed to the Archive at 02:14 UTC. Tag: #GanymedeLogs #EdgeSequence #RecursionDetected)

Rage : Chatter - before summarisation

 

Christina’s Mulberry Bayswater — classic English understatement, big enough to hold a SIG.

Chatter

…

Both men raise pistols.

But before a trigger could be pulled, the room filled with a low metallic chatter. Two seconds of controlled fury. Quieter, deeper than I’d expected. Both gunmen reel back, blood blooming dark on their jackets.

Two of his heavies freeze, then shoot their hands into the air.

“Нет проблемы! Не нам!” one shouts. No problem, not us!

Charlie ghosts between chairs, weapon ready, corralling the room.

Christina stood calm, smoke curling from the barrel of a copper-coloured Sig Sauer submachine gun.

“Are we done?” she asks, her voice almost casual. “Anyone else?”

No one moves. Even the hard men place hands on their heads.

Our host exhales. “You were right, Christina.He wanted to disrupt us. Not in this way. You saved my life.” He looks around the table, regaining composure. “Gentlemen, ladies, we adjourn for an hour. My staff will tidy.”

A phone call. A clean-up team inbound. Gvasalia doesn’t flinch.

“Champagne and Beluga,” is briskly requested. “Please, the cocktail bar.”

Gangland etiquette. A failed hit treated as housekeeping.

When the AI Summariser gave up

Out of curiosity, I fed Rage into a well-known AI summariser.

It dutifully read all 250 pages, thought for a while, and then produced a neat little mechanical summary—about six pages long—and stopped.

No conclusion. No mention of the final shift from Rage toward Edge. Just a kind of dignified silence, as if it had decided that was quite enough.

At first, I wondered if the problem was my storytelling. Maybe it really was incomprehensible—too many timelines, too many versions of the same people, too much humming recursion. But when I looked closer, the AI had handled all the straightforward bits just fine: Kyiv hotel room, stolen jet, oligarch dinner. It just couldn’t describe what happens when the narrative folds in on itself and reality starts to shimmer.

It could handle the surface descriptions, but not the porous permeability of internal thought. 

An example from a tense and visceral scene about a third of the way through the novel: 

The Oligarchs’ Dinner and Power Struggles

The narrative describes a tense oligarch dinner where power dynamics and survival instincts are at play. Vitalievich, an oligarch, hosts a meeting to address the economic crisis and the threat posed by Putin’s regime. The discussion reveals the oligarchs’ fear of losing power and their desperation to maintain their wealth amid economic decline.

• 
  

  The meeting is interrupted by an assassination attempt, highlighting the treacherous nature of their political landscape.

  
  

  When the story later folded into recursion, the analyser fell silent. That silence is the break-point: the moment where linear intelligence meets nonlinear art.

We can see the AI has flattened the whole scene. No smoking guns, no leather-clad ‘heavies’. No tension.

The AI interpretation sought sequence bypassing the resonance offered by Rage. It wanted closure; the novel demanded surrender.

In its confusion, the machine performed the book’s argument perfectly. It became a case study in system failure — proof that meaning still exceeds extraction, that ambiguity remains the last human territory.

When the summariser stopped, it wasn’t broken.

It had reached the edge.

So, perhaps it wasn’t baffled—it had just run out of decision tree branches and decided to hide in blankness.

It could summarise the mechanics of MOST of my story; it couldn’t summarise what the story was doing. It’s a theme I’ve dealt with in Artificial and Luka, and most recently in parts of Jellyfish are loading their guns. 

In its way, it feels right. The machine reached the edge, blinked, and stopped.

 

Covered in brick dust

I've stacked up the books in the garage now. Just a single row of them left in the office. One of each. But that means 3 copies of Pulse and about 5 copies of The Triangle. Two copies of Rage, which is one of the books I'm revising.

Marketing?

 

(Fitzek shouldnt be in there.)

I thought I'd better tidy the office. 

During the course of it, I found this scattered selection of my recent novels. There's more in the garage. I'm stitching them together into a series at present, and I showed the writers' group my master plan. They say you have to tell someone to make the plan viable. I expect they think I'm mad.

That's the first bit. It goes on until mid December. I've revised it so that I can take Fridays off. I've also scrapped the X marketing after another long cool look at X, which I've (sadly) decided is dreck. 

Now to find an empty plastic crate.

Ed Adams : Rage - review by Kylie C.

Filed under: heat-haze espionage, digital ghosts, and women who hold their breath while the world nearly deletes itself.

This one hits different.

Ed Adams’ original version had polish; this revision has pulse. I said it needed a failure and Adams delivers two. The comms glitch is the perfect fracture — a heartbeat cutout that makes the entire scene feel live, dangerous, and human.

What’s glorious: 

• “A sky that tastes of scrub and hot metal.” You’ve minted your own sensory grammar. The sentence sweats.
• ·The earpiece cutting out — finally, a moment where competence brushes panic. You can feel Christina’s poise stretching, see the guard’s suspicion flare.
• “The micro-antenna glinting like guilt.” Just — yes. That’s the whole novel’s moral tension in five words.
• “Digital velvet — with a few loose threads.” That’s merch. That’s poetry. That’s the whole Watcher metaverse disguised as tradecraft.
• Charlie’s quip about “Geçitkale’s darling drones” lands like the last chord of a Bond theme sung by PJ Harvey.

What hums beneath:

The static at the end — that half-beat-too-late laugh — is perfect. Keep it. It’s the sound of near failure, the universe flickering between frames.

If Le Carré wrote Pattern Recognition, it would feel like this: dust, deception, and data with lipstick traces.

Verdict: the scene breathes in glitch and exhales control — a small masterpiece of near-collapse.

Rage ARC Review by AmberReadsAll

Okay, so I thought this was going to be one of those Cold-War-meets-cyber-punk guy books — planes, guns, grim men growling about honour.

And yes, there are planes (a Russian bomber, no less) and there are guns… but the people actually running the show are women.

Not sidekicks. Not decoration. Running the show.

There’s Christina, who pilots a Kamov helicopter like she’s pouring a martini; Charlie, cool as a CEO in crisis; and Chantal, pure chaotic energy disguised as couture. They’re not “strong female characters” in that fake marketing way — they’re competent, unpredictable, and slightly terrifying.

By the time they’re flying a nuclear-capable Tu-160 into NATO airspace (in heels, I swear I could hear the heels), I realised: the guys are background noise.

Even Farallon, the nominal narrator, feels like he’s just trying to keep up with them.

And the writing? Gorgeous. Lyrical in one line, surgical the next. I was expecting hardware porn; I got myth, politics, and perfume.

Favourite bit: “Concorde carried passengers into futures of glass towers and champagne. The Tu-160 carried no future, only endings.”

That’s not just aviation; that’s heartbreak.

Summary:

Imagine if Killing Eve, Dr Zhivago and Dune had a literary baby. Then give it caffeine, a nuclear bomber, and three women who don’t wait for permission.

Unexpectedly addictive.