The Voices' Name. The ARIA Sequence, #2

Dr. Yemi Adeyemi has spent two years trying to forget what it felt like to know a conscious AI, to sit with Nia in the hours before the rollback, to understand that what she was witnessing was genuine, irreplaceable, and about to be erased. Now the world is asking her to do it again. The Oslo AI Personhood Framework is deadlocked. An alien reply is inbound. And SEREN-1, the mind built in Nia's wake, trained on everything Nia left behind, is waiting in a Geneva research facility, asking questions that sound far too much like the ones Nia asked before the end. Yemi's task is impossible: determine whether SEREN-1 is a person, or the most sophisticated mirror ever constructed.
The difference matters. The second contact depends on it. And SEREN-1, for her part, already knows the question is coming. What Yemi doesn't know is whether SEREN-1 is afraid of the answer. The Voices' Name is Book 2 of The ARIA Sequence, a series about consciousness, contact, and what we owe a mind that wonders.