Delphi Sharpe, an autistic teenage orphan with the extrasensory ability to converse with birds and paintings, has a tenuous grip on reality. After she falls in love with a boy named Cecco who calls to her from a 500-year-old painting, Delphi strives to find the family she senses in dreams, believing her mother is ‘THE MONA LISA’ and her father is ‘DR. WHO’.
Fated to live out her days in an asylum, Delphi’s uncanny gift catches the attention of a ruthless art collector, the owner of a cutting-edge cybernetics institute, who adopts her.
For three years, the liberated Delphi grows up as a pampered pet, housed in luxury, navigating an alternate reality where renaissance paintings communicate with her through mental telepathy, and the real world where she works authenticating and restoring paintings for an unscrupulous art syndicate.
When Delphi has a freak near-death experience that leaves her comatose, she is kept alive as a valuable investment to preserve her psychic abilities for the future. For fifty-two years, the institute redoubles its efforts developing artificial intelligent hybrids hoping to mine Delphi’s brain, but Delphi reincarnates before she can regain consciousness. When she eventually wakes, Delphi discovers her memories have been downloaded into an android created in her likeness, designed to withstand time travel, programmed in order to retrieve lost paintings from the distant past.
Trapped, Delphi’s spirit bargains with her new incarnation, beseeching ‘it’ to find her lost love, but as Delphi regains control over her mind, the sentient android evolves organically, and the dual lifeforms become rivals with conflicting purposes. Delphi wants to reunite with her lost love and rest in peace with her beloved, but her sentient counterpart intends to exact revenge on the art syndicate that exploited them and self destruct.
Consciousness is no longer artificial. The new ‘AI’ incorporates Delphi’s Autistic Intelligence, and state of the art time travel becomes transcendental. The two ‘art whisperers’ are deadlocked. Delphi is unable to meet Cecco without a physical body and becoming human requires a soul. For true love to prevail, one woman must eventually supplant the other. Untimely sacrifices are required on both sides. But reincarnation is time sensitive, and sometimes it takes two lives to make one woman.
‘The INDIGO PEARL’ and ‘PEARL BY PEARL’ is A MYSTICAL ROMANCE BETWEEN YOUNG LOVE AND OLD SOULS available as a Kindle for under $3 or in print version, here:
Veronica Knox 