Glowing red lines split their faces. Shock-red hair and clothes warn people to flee their approach. They are plague birds, the powerful merging of humans and artificial intelligences who serve as judges and executioners after the collapse of civilization.

And the plague birds’ judgement is swift and deadly, as Crista discovered as a child when she watched one kill her mother.

In a world of gene-modded humans constantly watched over by benevolent AIs, everyone hates and fears the plague birds. But to save her father and home village, Crista becomes the very creature she fears the most. And her first task as a plague bird is hunting down an ancient group of murderers wielding magic-like powers.

As Crista and her AI symbiote travel farther from home than she ever imagined, they are plunged into a strange world where she judges wrongdoers, befriends other outcasts, and uncovers an extremely personal conspiracy that threatens the lives of millions.

Plague Birds is a genre-bending mix of science fiction and dark fantasy and the epic story of a young woman who becomes one of the future’s most hated creatures, with a killer AI bonded to her very blood.

Plague Birds
by Jason Sanford (Thailand 1994-96)
Self-Published
315 pages
September 2021
$6.99 (Kindle); $16.95 (Paperback)

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Jason Sanford

Jason has published more than a dozen of his short stories in the British science fiction magazine Interzone, which once devoted a special issue to his fiction. His fiction has also been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog: Science Fiction and Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fireside, InterGalactic Medicine Show, Tales of the Unanticipated, and other places. Books containing his stories include multiple “year’s best” story collections, the Tachyon anthology The New Voices of Science Fiction, and original anthologies such as Bless Your Mechanical Heart.