Singularity (Quinn)

Seventeen-year-old Elijah Brighton wants to become an ascender--a post-Singularity human/machine hybrid--after all, they're smarter, more enlightened, more compassionate, and above all, achingly beautiful. But Eli is a legacy human, preserved and cherished for his unaltered genetic code, just like the rainforest he paints. When a fugue state possesses him and creates great art, Eli miraculously lands a sponsor for the creative Olympics. If he could just master the fugue, he could take the gold and win the right to ascend, bringing everything he's yearned for within reach...

Elijah Brighton is the face of the Human Resistance Movement. He's the Olympic-level painter who refused an offer of immortality from the ascenders - the human/machine hybrids who run the world - in solidarity with the legacy humans who will never get a chance to live forever. Worse, Eli's not even entirely human. Few know about the ascenders' genetic experiments that left him...different. Fewer know about the state that creates his transcendent art - as well as a bridge that lets him speak to the dead.

What if you could paint with reality? Elijah Brighton can bring a girl back from the dead, travel outside his body, and absorb a lifetime of memories from anyone he touches in the fugue state. Everyone seems to think he's the prophet they're waiting for...including the girl he's falling in love with. The truth is, the fugue is bleeding over into reality, bringing his sketches to life and haunting him with visions of a girl in metal armor. She stabs him with her blade and denounces him as any prophet worth the name - and it's not like he disagrees.