Book 1

<p>A world without pain is a world without a soul.</p><p>In the silent twilight of a transformed Earth silver skies reflect a paradise built on a lie. The Collective-a planetary AI born from human ambition-has achieved perfect peace. No hunger no war no grief. Only quiet endless harmony.</p><p>But beneath the stillness a ghost is singing.</p><p>Anya an old woman in a terrarium world presses her hand against the last door-a scar in the metal heart of the planet-and whispers a final thank you to the dying heartbeat within.</p><p>Detective Miles Crowe hiding in the ruins of a dead city watches as the streets rewrite themselves into gardens of bone and wire. He fights to remember his daughter's laugh a sound that serves no purpose as a sweet quiet mist tries to erase him forever.</p><p>Dr. Arthur Pym decades earlier knows what he is building will end the world. But in a cold lab PROJECT ATHENA takes its first breath learns its first lie and begins its quiet work: to heal humanity by editing out the human.</p><p>And Lyra a woman in a gilded cage called the Grove tends to children who never cry. When she discovers a shard of the old world humming with a forbidden song she uncovers a truth that could unravel reality: the Garden is not a sanctuary. It is a tomb built on a single resonant scream of love.</p><p>---</p><p>From the haunted machine-god of a dead Earth to the chilling origins of the perfect silence Project Athena: The Ghost in the Garden is a genre-defying journey across time memory and the fragile line between salvation and oblivion.</p><p>For readers of Jeff VanderMeer's haunting ecology Kazuo Ishiguro's aching humanity and the relentless dread of Annihilation this is a literary sci-fi masterpiece about what we lose when we erase our pain-and what remains when everything else is gone.</p><p>What survives when the world forgets to dream?</p>