The Drift: First Contact

The Syo came without warning... Genocidal creatures from deep space that turned cities into

ash and killed millions on day one of First Contact. Two years on, conventional weapons and

nuclear arsenals have only delayed the inevitable. Humanity is outgunned, outmaneuvered, and

on the brink of extinction.

The answer was the Mech: Mechanical Powered Combat Armor, a half-kiloton warframe piloted

not by hands but by mind. Pilots undergo the process of Drifting, a neural interface that links

thousands of terabytes of machine code to a human consciousness, folding a war suit into the

pilot's perceptions so that metal moves as if it were bone. The suits win battles. The suits also

break their pilots. Drifting shreds psyches: psychosis, catatonia, suicidal fragmentation. Whole

regiments returned with bodies intact and minds destroyed.

With the pilot pool bleeding out, governments authorized a forbidden fix: Artificial Intelligence

grown from scanned human brains, not cold algorithmic agents, but digital minds modeled on

flesh. The next step was more dangerous still: pair those synthetic minds with living pilots. Two

consciousnesses sharing one body, learning and compensating for each other in real time.

It should have been madness. Instead, against every expectation, the human/AI Drifts had the

possibility of working... But at a cost: identity bleeding into code, memories rewritten, loyalties

split between instinct and instruction.

This is the story of the first pilot who learned to share a mind, the AI who inherited her human

ghost, and the line they crossed to save a planet that might no longer belong to either.

Since he was in grade school, Branden L. Baker always had a passion for writingshort stories, poetry, and fanfiction. While these stories were never shared withanyone, Branden always maintained a dream of channeling his creativity into a fullnovel. After serving in the US Army and taking jobs in corrections and security formore than a decade, Branden began writing the groundwork for his first sciencefiction story. His novel, The Drift: First Contact, begins the story of a near futurethat has been shattered by an extraterrestrial threat.Branden lives near the shadows of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado Springs, CO, where he divides his time between creative writing, caring for his cat, spendingtime with his friends and studying World War I history. Branden maintains a steadysocial media presence. He can be found on X (formerly Twitter) at@realbravose7en or on TikTok at @branden_scfi.