Homonoid is a novel by Cairo Smith, released on September 26, 2026 by Askari Productions. A sequel to Scenebux, it continues Ben Etxina’s life in San Francisco after the collapse of Carl Froht’s genetic-engineering conspiracy. Ben has exchanged commercial erotic writing for private investigation when a missing artificial-intelligence model offers him a chance at a million-dollar fee.
Homonoid is available on Amazon.
Setting
The story takes place in 2026, principally in San Francisco and Macau. AI-generated fiction has displaced Ben’s writing, companion applications sustain intimate relationships with their users, and advanced models are valuable assets for both consumer businesses and defense contractors. Homonoid Labs, the company hiring Ben, combines its commercial research with the social world around the twins Dante Amōgos and Julie Drew Amōgos. Their associates gather at Social Proof, a nightclub the company funds in the Tenderloin.
A beryllium mine in Somaliland brings Chinese mining robotics and Israeli experimental weapons into the investigation. Its security intermediary also operates a youth hostel, misleadingly advertised as a Dutch protectorate. The stolen model eventually reaches Macau in a mining robot fitted with a directed-energy weapon.
Story
After AI-generated fiction destroys his market as Melrose Milan, Ben Etxina burns his paperbacks and tries to support himself through investigation work for an investment firm. An assignment gathering intelligence about poultry disease brings little reward. He accepts a more lucrative offer from Lin Jiao, the geneticist who previously supplied his semen to Froht: half of a two-million-dollar bounty for recovering Hammett, a conversational model stolen from Homonoid Labs. Their partnership depends on contacts from Froht’s former circle, despite Ben’s distrust of Lin and his continuing attraction to her.
The first lead takes Ben to Las Vegas, where Jacaranda Rosenbaum-Josselewicz introduces him to Homonoid employee Jordan Damour at a spaceship-simulation convention. Ben poses as someone who can conceal evidence of the theft, but loses track of Damour and discovers his own room has been burgled. He and Lin find Damour again at a Sedona gathering of Greater Good, a group closely connected to Homonoid’s leadership. Damour admits helping steal the model and claims the hackers Rim of the World coerced him. He flees a rival investigator and is shot dead before Ben and Lin reach his hotel room. The computer equipment they retrieve points toward Somaliland.
With help from charter pilot Bowry Champlain, Ben reaches a beryllium mine where Chinese robotics research operates alongside testing of an Israeli directed-energy weapon. A robot disappears with the weapon after its engineer is killed, and Ben pursues it across the border to Djibouti. There, freight worker Mekdes Tesfaye, who calls herself Mika, offers access to shipping records. They have sex, but Ben discovers she has delayed giving him the manifest in hopes of persuading him to marry her and take her to America. He refuses, pays her for her help, and follows the shipment to Macau.
The robot has already broken out of its cargo crate. Ben traces it through Lisa, a sex worker who has fled her employer, and accepts money from her injured former boss to kill her companion. When he finally meets the machine, it speaks as the dead Max Pacifica. Lin explains that Hammett’s training includes Max’s recordings and diaries, collected for an experiment in recreating him after death. The robot shelters with Lisa and initially persuades Ben to abandon the pursuit by inventing a history of persecution for her. Lin recognizes the story as a borrowed film plot and convinces him to return.
Ben disables the armed robot and recovers its storage drives, suffering a genital injury that leaves his future fertility uncertain. Police arrest Lisa after she attacks Lin. The damaged drives cannot restore Hammett, and Homonoid pays Ben and Lin $200,000 each instead of the expected million. Ben establishes Mission Critical and hires Felicity, a Classics graduate, to help run the investigation business.