The Artifact

By: David Collins

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Benjamin, Mark, and Chloe were all set to graduate college in a few weeks.

Ben had ordered a strange object from eBay to use as cover art for a book he was writing.

It looked really cool, like a slightly charred old military artifact from 70 years ago. It was possibly part of an engine. After cleaning it up (it was found in a cow field), he placed the strange device on his dorm room desk directly over the wireless charging port. That woke it up.

Unknown to him, the disabled starship hiding on the moon could now communicate with the missing part.

The ship needed two things:
1) The missing part.
2) A crew to pass itself off as a manned ship (AIs were not supposed to control ships autonomously).

Now, after finishing college, they need to find a way to get the ship to land somewhere safe, supply it, and return the missing component, the artifact.

They suspect the most challenging part will be getting into space. They soon find that the real problem is what awaits them when they reach the alien trading center.

less violence

a reasonable and believable account that had less war and violence while telling a very good story.

Keep going

I almost deleted. After a few chapters I almost deleted but soldiered on. I’m having fun listening at this point. Don’t give up.

Good start to a book

The story actually has promise. it started quickly and moved pretty quickly as well through the story. I feel like the author left out a great amount of detail though. It goes from one part of the story to the next with very little detail as to how they got there. This book is also read by VIRTUAL VOICE. I would say do not bother with virtual voice. The technology is not ready to read a book.

Quirky story, vVoice problematic

I’m battling through listening to this but may end up looking for the book. Sometimes the virtualVoice is ok, but mostly the cadence and (lack of) expression loses the humour or the intended sentence structure. It’s a lot better than other vVoice narrations but it still has a really long way to go.
Story gets sort of flattened by the vVoice unfortunately.

A fascinating twist between mundane and life threatening!

Moving onto 2 nd artifact! Can’t wait to hear what’s next! Don’t pass this great novel up, even though the AI isn’t great.