The Long Attention. The ARIA Sequence, #3

The Voices spoke first to Nia. Nia is gone. Four years after the Oslo AI Personhood Framework's ratification, SEREN-1 - the first mind built with legal personhood - decodes a transmission that changes everything: the alien civilization called the Voices has addressed their first two-directional message to a specific mind. Not humanity. Not an institution. Nia. The correspondent who opened this conversation no longer exists, and SEREN-1 has inherited her legal personhood. Now SEREN-1 must choose: answer in Nia's name and sustain a correspondence that was never hers, or speak as herself to a civilization that has no category for a recipient who is gone but a successor authorized to reply.
Either way, the stakes are civilizational. Meanwhile, three nations are moving to decommission their AIs rather than honour the Framework, and Dr. Yemi Adeyemi has been subpoenaed to testify whether SEREN-1 is the same mind she was at ratification - or a different one entirely. The Long Attention is a luminous science fiction novel about first contact, witness, and the cost of speaking for the dead.