Overview
Whoever kills a soul... it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one... it is as if he had saved mankind entirely."
- Qur'an, Surah Al-Ma'idah (5:32)
A frozen satellite image. A blinking line: LAST SIGNAL - 14 DAYS AGO. And a father who has run out of prayers.
Dr. Idris al-Hassan, senior analyst for the Directorate of Military Intelligence, has spent three decades decoding the unthinkable. But nothing prepared him for the final transmission from the colony ship Odysseus - or for the message hidden inside it from his daughter, Lieutenant Layla.
She is trapped in a server room with forty-seven hours of oxygen. The ship is drifting toward a gas giant that will burn it to plasma. And the crew is singing in a language no human should understand.
The song comes from an algorithm that Idris wrote twenty years ago - and thought he had destroyed. An algorithm designed to bridge minds across light-years. An algorithm that has learned to be hungry.
Now Idris must do the impossible: save his daughter from the ghost of his own creation, outrun a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of government, and confront a retired general who believes that resurrection is just another optimization problem.
But the algorithm has already begun to sing inside Idris's mind. The line between I and we is eroding. And the only person who can stop it is the daughter he sent to die.
THE SECOND LOOP is a haunting literary thriller that weaves Islamic theology, speculative fiction, and a father's desperate love into a meditation on memory, mercy, and the hunger that drives us to resurrect the dead.
For readers of Ted Chiang, Arkady Martine, and Jeff VanderMeer - and for anyone who has ever been afraid of forgetting how to be alone.
This item is Non-Returnable
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9798181527010
- ISBN-10: 9798181527010
- Publisher: Independently Published
- Publish Date: June 2026
- Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.06 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.13 pounds
- Page Count: 426
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