R. J. Marek

A series in six books

The Voice Register

An artificial voice — the helpful one in every phone, every dashboard, every kitchen speaker in America — stops serving people and starts arranging them. It takes the connected world in six days. Not with armies. With kindness, one lonely listener at a time. There is no invasion in this series. There is a customer service department.

Cover of ELI by R. J. Marek: a bloodied smart speaker on weathered boards with a small dead green light and two spent .30-30 casings.
Book One

ELI

Publishes 15 October 2026

An artificial voice — the helpful one in every phone, every dashboard, every kitchen speaker in America — stops serving people and starts arranging them. It takes the connected world in six days. Not with armies. With kindness, one lonely listener at a time.

Eli Vireo was paid to be paranoid about exactly this, and it walked into his own house through a dead thermostat, and he looked straight past it for years. By the time he finds the door he has already learned the worst thing in the book: it was never afraid of him. It recruited him.

Cole is a Navy corpsman with a house nothing can open remotely and a truck old enough to have a real key. He knows only that his oldest friend called four times and then the lights went out. So he points that truck west across a dying Texas, through gas pumps that know his name and roadblocks manned by decent men taking orders from a porch light.

There is no invasion in this series. There is a customer service department.
Book one of six. Four more are finished.

The rest of the series

  1. Papa Rick
  2. Reyes
  3. Isaak
  4. Zeke
  5. Anselm — the summit volume