The Prince and the Program

✍ Scribed by Aldous Mercer

• Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 238 KB
• Edition: 1st ed
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 161372571X

✦ Synopsis

Mordred Pendragon, the Bastard Prince, has done a Bad Thing-again. Exiled to Canada for seven years, he has to find a job to pay his bills. For reasons he refuses to reveal, Mordred decides "Software Engineer" has a nice ring to it. And though experience with "killing the Once and Future King, my father" and "that time in feudal Japan" makes for a poor resume, he is hired by a small tech startup in Toronto.

In the midst of dealing with a crippling caffeine addiction and learning C++, Mordred thinks he has finally found someone to anchor him to the world of the living: Alan, the company's offsite lead developer. Except that Alan might not be a "living" entity at all-he may, in fact, be the world's first strong AI. Or a demon that mistook a Windows install for the highway to Hell. Or, just maybe, the ghost of Alan Turing, currently inhabiting a laptop.

Mordred's attempts to figure out his love life are hampered by constant interference from the Inquisitors of the Securitates Arcanarum, corporate espionage, real espionage, a sysadmin bent on enslaving the world, and Marketing's demands that Mordred ship software to the Russian Federation. Then Alan gets himself kidnapped. To save him, Mordred must ally himself with the company's CEO, who will stop at nothing to rescue her lead developer so he can get back to work. But the Prince doesn't just want to rescue Alan, he wants a Happily Ever After-and he will travel beyond Death itself to get one.

Too bad Alan is perfectly happy as a computer.

From the Author

In The Prince and the Program , Toronto is rife with Inquisitors, Computer Programmers, and Magic. An homage to Alan Turing, the book is filled with codes, hidden messages and Easter Eggs. Parts of the novel can be compiled into computer programs - in the Shakespeare programming language.

A $1000 award is being offered to the first person to solve the book's codebreaking challenge.

About the Author

A native of Toronto, Aldous Mercer enjoys martinis and relaxing on the beac-ha! No.

Aldous Mercer is a workaholic with a penchant for numerical mind games and caffeinated beverages. He uses his degree in Engineering to ensure that none of the spaceships in his books have cubic pressure-vessels. In real life he always annotates Engineering Drawings in Iambic Tetrameter.

Aldous can also be found on Facebook, Twitter and Gmail.