Adam Novana
The seeker at the heart of Why Am I Here?
Adam begins his journey with something most people spend a lifetime acquiring: knowledge.
What he doesn’t have is a reason to live.
Born in Novana in the Fourth Millennium, Adam has never known a family, friendship, romantic love – or even the ordinary pleasure of meaningful human conversation. Artificial intelligence and the Plakerols have gradually assumed virtually every useful human function. People are provided for, protected and managed. They have also been robbed of something far more precious: the need to matter. And all feelings.
Adam is different. Created through genetically engineered DNA – he does not become robot-like as do all other fellow Novanians.
Brilliant, sarcastic, curious and sometimes maddeningly naïve about other people, he possesses extraordinary knowledge of the human world that existed before AI domination. Yet knowing what life once was only makes his own emptiness more unbearable. He is driven to despair.
Then an impossible doorway opens.
Adam escapes Novana and is given another chance at life in the magical world of Taoland. There he encounters friendship, beauty, ambition, temptation, laughter, betrayal – and, most unexpectedly, love.
He falls hopelessly for Tariana.
He becomes a husband and father. An inventor. A rising executive. A leader.
And therein lies Adam’s greatest danger.
Having grown up with nothing, Adam becomes consumed with achieving everything, except true purpose. Success, recognition, wealth and power begin masquerading as false purpose he searches for. The harder he works to give his family everything he never had, the greater the risk that he will lose the very people he loves.
Along the way, Adam is guided – and occasionally confronted – by an extraordinary collection of angels, gurus, mentors, friends and adversaries. Each imparts something. Each forces him to confront a different version of the same question.
Why am I here?
Over a period of thirty years, Adam changes profoundly. Yet his journey is not about becoming perfect.
It is about discovering what makes a human life matter.
And ultimately Adam must decide whether our purpose is found in what we accomplish, what we possess, whom we love—or what we give to others.