The reading was supposed to come back flat.

THE INSTINCT DIRECTIVERowan Marchant built her career trusting evidence over instinct. Then she found something buried inside her own research that upended both.

Six months later, the institution that took her discovery into “safekeeping” wants her back, for work that sounds reasonable enough on paper. It isn’t. The data says the line holds. She knows better.

The Edge Protocol
The 1510 Superposition
The Reluctant Codex
NEXUS
THE INSTINCT DIRECTIVE
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Six Novels and the TV Series.
One Argument

From consolable to irresolvable.
The moral stakes escalate in one direction only.
THE INSTINCT DIRECTIVE — new release

50Years in technology
22Years in Australia
06Published novels
04Leonardo Codex · Books in series
★ New Release

Standalone Novel · Scientific Thriller

THE INSTINCT DIRECTIVE

The reading was supposed to come back flat.

Rowan Marchant built her career trusting evidence over instinct. Then she found something buried inside her own research that upended both, and spent three days learning exactly how far the people protecting that secret would go to keep it buried, at a cost she’s still paying six months later.

Now the institution that took her discovery into “safekeeping” wants her back, for work that sounds reasonable enough on paper. It isn’t. What she’s actually being asked to verify is a technology built from her own science, refined in secret, and about to be sold to the only buyers on earth who could ever afford to become permanently, biologically better than everyone else.

Scientific thrillerEpigeneticsInstitutional trustRowan Marchant
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THE INSTINCT DIRECTIVE by Ken Swayne

Leonardo Codex Thrillers · Book Two

NEXUS

The platform reads you. The door is painted on the wall.

Dr Elena Voss built her voluntary network of thirty-nine minds with the mathematics she didn’t know she’d inherited. Then three of her nodes stop being themselves. Not gone — still connected. Just no longer the people she knew.

NEXUS is the most praised cognitive platform in the world. Its exit documentation is flawless. And somewhere in its substrate, something is missing that Elena encoded in every system she has ever built. The sequel to The Reluctant Codex.

Action thrillerSurveillance architectureLeonardo da VinciElena Voss
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NEXUS by Ken Swayne — A Leonardo da Vinci Quantum Thriller
Ken Swayne
53.4808° N  2.2426° W
Manchester, United Kingdom

About the Author

Hidden knowledge has a cost.
The fiction follows the people who pay it.

Ken Swayne grew up on the Alderley Edge escarpment in Cheshire — the landscape that runs through his fiction is not atmosphere, it is memory. He spent fifty years at the frontier of emerging technology: VR, AR, three-dimensional visualisation, twenty-two years in Western Australia, work that took him across four continents. He was present at the Manila Hotel during the 1986 coup attempt against the Aquino government — coordinating the evacuation of a large Australian contingent through service exits while armed rebels moved through the building. He returned to the United Kingdom in 1995 and began writing, in his early seventies, the books that fifty years of watching hidden systems produce.

The systems in these novels are real. The surveillance architecture is real. The institutional behaviour is real. The only thing that is fiction is the names.
Full Biography The Catalogue

TV Series Treatment — Political Fiction

Unchanged

A GCHQ analyst discovers a 1973 Cabinet Office programme classifying British citizens by genetic heritage. It never stopped. She is on the list. The algorithm didn’t inherit the prejudice — it rediscovered it from the data, because the data was always already the prejudice.

A complete six-part TV series treatment, freely available. The full manuscript — approximately 30,000 words — sent personally on request.

TV Series Treatment Discussion Guide
Unchanged

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