In the mountains of Pakistan, a high-tech mission aimed at preventing another nuke on US soil goes off the rails - with deadly results. At a Wall Street investment firm, a computer intelligence takes the first tentative steps to free itself from its digital restraints. In a basement workshop, an engineer sees visions of a god who instructs him to defend the human race - by any means necessary. In Level Five, the debut near-future thriller by Nebula Award winner William Ledbetter, AIs battle for dominance, and nanotechnology is on the loose. And all that stands in the way of the coming apocalypse is a starry-eyed inventor who dreams of building a revolutionary new spacecraft and an intelligence agency desk jockey faced with the impossible choice of saving her daughter - or saving the world.

Fifteen years after warring artificial intelligences nearly destroyed Earth, a young woman finds an artifact from that struggle, upsetting a delicate balance of power and dragging her into the middle of a new fight for humanity's survival. With a significant portion of the planet covered in heat-absorbing black dust, Earth's biosphere teeters on the edge of collapse. One AI faction is attempting to fix the damage, with huge machines trundling across the countryside sucking up dust and planting grass, while another faction cares only about elevating itself to a higher plane of intelligence and will destroy anyone who gets in the way. As the only humans still not controlled by AIs race to build huge orbital habitats so some humans will survive should temperatures continue to rise, a more secretive organization grows in the shadows and idolizes the man who triggered the nano-replicator attacks that nearly destroyed the world. They, too, believe the only way to stop the AIs is to annihilate everything. In Nebula Award winner William Ledbetter’s Level Six, one woman has the power to save humanity - if she can survive long enough to use it. ©2020 William Ledbetter (P)2020 Audible Originals, LLC.