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In June 2038 the count is seventy-one states for and a hundred and four needed, and the modelling says 2047. Everybody supports the instrument. Nobody wants to be among the first to sign an agreement they can never leave.

At 04:11 on Friday the thirteenth of August, eleven observatories on the night side of the Earth record the same thing at the same moment.

The Aperture proved they can be invisible. This is a decision.

Asha Varghese spends the following eleven weeks arguing, in public and increasingly alone, that the species must not adopt its constitution because a fleet is coming - that we would be passing the examination by cheating on the only question ever asked. She loses the argument comprehensively. She is also right, and the arithmetic is in the register, and she has never stopped believing both.

It passes on the eleventh of October 2038 by fifty-one per cent to forty-nine.

And then, with a bare majority for the most irreversible act in human history and four hundred and forty-six people in the chamber who believe they have been steamrollered, a member of the losing side stands up and asks for the votes to be counted a third time on no procedural ground at all - because he wants to be able to tell his neighbours that he asked, and the answer was yes.

The expensive part of legitimacy is doing the unnecessary thing in front of the people who think it is necessary.

The fleet arrives at 11:04 on the twenty-ninth of October. What it does first is the most courteous act in this entire history, and nobody in the chamber expected it, and it takes ninety seconds for anyone to understand what they are looking at.

Book Five of six. Human Alliance, Volume One.

At 06:00 on the nineteenth of May 2031, every device on Earth capable of presenting words to a human being does so at once - telephones, departure boards, hearing aids, the audio systems of four hundred and eleven aircraft in cruise, and a two-hundred-rupee alarm clock in a rented room in Bengaluru.

It speaks for eleven minutes. It damages nothing. It touches no weapon and no operating theatre. It names the company, it names the date, and then it says ten words that break the world open:

This proxy does not know why you were not told.

The first four hours are quiet. People go and find somebody to be with. The disorder comes later.

Asha Varghese has been unemployed for five months and is being sued by her former employer. She has sixty-one pages of method under a mattress - not a claim, a procedure, the one document in the world that lets a stranger with a telescope find the thing for themselves. She has been carrying it since December because she is frightened.

A novel about disclosure: what it costs to be the person who says the true thing, and why an accurate allegation on a public record can end a life without anybody lying.

The Lasan Alliance says nothing at all for the next seven years. There is no fleet in this book and no battle. There is a legal opinion of sixty-four pages that is entirely correct and completely destructive, an inquiry that takes ten years, and a species that has finally been told the truth and discovers within seven months that being told the truth is not the same as being able to do anything about it.

Book Two of six. Human Alliance, Volume One.

Mira Kovač arrives naked in an Ontario wood at four in the morning on the fourteenth of May, 2029, eleven days later than the people who sent her intended. Nothing crosses with her. No clothes, no weapon, no documents, no proof that she was born in 2040 in a country that will one day be a republic with a president.

What she has is a body built to run at twenty-eight kilometres an hour, a drug grown into a pocket under her ribs that will keep that body from killing itself, and an instruction: keep the president alive until the third of December.

She knows how it goes. She has memorised the record. Five attempts on Étienne Rousseau's life, four of them failures, and the fifth one the reason a machine gets built that will one day remove her sister from the record of her own country — every document, every photograph, every registry line, until the people who loved her keep the memory and lose the proof.

What she does not know is why the record is wrong about almost everything that matters.

A thriller about the argument, not the chase

Mira is not the only person in 2029 who came from somewhere else. Teodor Vane has been here since 2027. He is seventy, he is dying, he has spent twenty years and eleven lives trying to stop the machine from ever existing — and the case he makes is the one she cannot answer.

Because her side keeps records, which means her side can be proved wrong in a court. And his side keeps none, which means nobody will ever be able to prove anything about the Undertow at all.

Fifty-one per cent against forty-nine. She is on the right side of it by about one per cent, and the book never pretends the margin is wider than that.

What you get

• A one-way time traveller with no gadgets, no backup and no way home — only a failing body and a date • An antagonist who is right about almost everything and is never secretly venal • A police inspector who cannot be told the truth and works it out anyway • A president who is not a symbol: a constitutional lawyer with a bad knee, a terminal diagnosis, and a signature four months from being worth more than his life • A body count that is counted — every death has a name, an age, and a line in a notebook that looks like accounts • A resolution that turns on a demonstration in front of four journalists, not on who shoots first

Super Agent Mira is a complete standalone novel of roughly 51,000 words, set in an alternate near future. It is a thriller for readers who want the moral argument to be as sharp as the action, in the tradition of the spy novel that is really about institutions.

A note on what this book is not

There are no gadgets and there is no way back. The technology is fixed, small and cruel: one direction, nothing crosses, an eleven-day error at forty-two years, and a drug that runs out. Nobody in this book saves everybody. The nurse who dies in chapter twenty-eight stays dead, and three chapters are spent on that, and if you want a thriller where the cost is announced and then quietly waived, this is not it.

Canada in these pages is a republic with a president. In the world you live in, it is a constitutional monarchy with a prime minister. Every institution, official and event in the book is invented.

In March 2030, at an observatory in Ladakh owned by a Luxembourg investment house, Dr Asha Varghese is clearing a queue of low-priority anomalies with a mug of tea going cold. One of them does not repeat at any interval that means anything.

Five months later a proxy of the Lasan Alliance speaks in a boardroom in Kirchberg. It is not a person, it has no name, and it has watched humanity for eleven weeks. It says our species identifies problems reliably, agrees they exist, solves them excellently and executes at scale - and fails at one thing only, which is acting when the acting is expensive to whoever decides.

Then it gives the condition, in ninety-one words, and tells the company to publish it within thirty days.

The company does not publish it. Nobody decides not to. It goes onto an agenda as item seven with fifteen minutes allocated.

This is the story of how the largest fact in human history was mislaid by careful people following excellent procedures - and of the four scientists on a plain at four and a half thousand metres who found it, one of whom is dead by the twelfth of July over the custody of a hard drive.

Told forty years later by the woman who read it. There is no villain anywhere in it, and that is the point.

The aliens arrive, deliver their terms, and go away for seven years. This is a novel about institutions, written as a memoir - about what eight billion people did with a message once they finally had it, and why nobody could be blamed for the six months in which they did not.

Book One of six. Human Alliance, Volume One.

By 2035 the instruments work. Water crosses boundaries, ports clear cargo in a common unit, a famine gets a derogation. What does not exist is a government - because a hundred specific authorities are not one authority, and the thing that decides when two of them disagree has to be written down.

The moment it is written down, two hundred and six states have something to refuse.

Asha Varghese writes article 11 in a hotel room in Montevideo in four hours: a definition of sovereignty that can be falsified, with a fourth limb that tests observed conduct rather than powers. It is the only thing she will ever write that outlives her. Nobody proposes a single word of change to it.

They attack the commencement provision instead - three lines of machinery nobody had thought about for more than an hour.

Every argument for delay is technically correct. Every person making it is honest. And because Asha annexed the nine equality measures to article 11 for reasons of drafting elegance, the measures go where the article goes: to the eleventh year.

So she does the only thing left. She makes the constitution state its own price - an appendix, four columns and eight rows, with the last column headed attributable to the transition schedule. It goes through without a vote against, and she does not understand why for years.

A novel about how good documents die, what happens to a person who spends four hundred days in a room with decent people, and the difference between deciding a thing and being unable to say when you decided it.

Still no fleet, still no battle. A drafting committee, a reading group in Kochi that finds the flaw four months before the professionals, a Norwegian negotiator who spends her career on eighteen months of schedule, and a table of numbers that somebody has to read aloud once a year for eleven years.

Book Four of six. Human Alliance, Volume One.

The condition requires one government, one currency and a demonstrable equality. There are two hundred and six sovereign states, and every one of them is the best thing some group of people managed to build out of a catastrophe.

Asha Varghese argues for speed, because delay has victims and the victims are the poorest. Idris Oyelaran - a constitutional lawyer from Ibadan, and the finest opponent she will ever have - argues that a species should not make an irreversible change on the first attempt, quickly, on the promise of a gift, from a giver who has said it will not be there afterwards.

Both of them are right. There is no fact in the world that decides between them.

In the first week of March 2033, three secretariats book venues in Lagos in the same district, because the dates were free. What happens next is not caused by anybody. A banner on a footbridge, a fuel stall, a generator, and a hydrant network at a fifth of its nominal pressure - and four hundred and forty of the best hydrologists in the world in a hotel four kilometres away with a map of the district, every one of whom knows exactly what to do and none of whom has any authority to do it.

The middle book of the series and the one that turns it. A disaster that nobody caused, an inquiry that finds nobody responsible, and the reason that finding is the most important thing in its report.

No aliens appear in this book. They said their piece in 2031 and went away. What replaces them is a duty roster on a wall in Rotterdam with eleven telephone numbers on it - the first body in human history that can both see a problem whole and act on it, built by municipal engineers who had no position on any of this and simply wanted the water to be able to cross a boundary.

Book Three of six. Human Alliance, Volume One.

Humanity has met the condition. The Lasan confirm the nine measures without amending a single figure and add three words that will frighten Asha Varghese for the rest of her life: that is early.

Then they ask their question. Membership is unlimited technology at no cost, for ever, with no obligation to request anything - and it cannot be left, cannot be revoked, and cannot be ceased.

There is one region in their own roll they will not discuss. Six or seven positions where the markers stop and resume. It was asked about in 2030 and met with eleven seconds of silence.

We will not answer this outside the Alliance.

So the species is asked to enter an irrevocable arrangement in order to be told the thing that would tell it whether to enter. It enters. Eleven days later it is told, in nine thousand words, and the answer is not a trick and was never concealed - it was withheld for a reason that turns the entire eight and a half years into something that had been run on us, honestly, in plain sight.

The Alliance is an agreement among species that none of us will cease alone.

The final book of Volume One. The purpose of the Lasan Alliance is disclosed, the Tirani are named, and a fisheries inspector from Ambon who read a document in a reading group asks the question that nobody in the room had the standing to ask.

It ends where it began: a woman of seventy-five in Bengaluru, an item in a queue, a plain in Ladakh, and the finding that there was never a right person and there has never once been one.

Book Six of six, and the close of Human Alliance, Volume One. The war it discloses is Volume Two.