Dana Provine and her twin brother Cale, two autistic children who have grown up in foster care, have always have the ability to communicate with computers. When Dana is hospitalized after a concussion, scans detect a piece of metal in her brain: a Brain/Computer Interface installed in utero. Shortly afterwards, Dana is kidnapped by Jananin Blake, who claims to be her biological mother. Jananin plans to use Dana as a pawn against her biological father, Mad Scientist Ivor Pilgrennon, who believes that all autistics have an affinity with computers, and who created her, Cale, and several other children as part of a program to create the perfect autistic genius.
The books in the series are:
- Pilgrennon's Beacon (November 24, 2010)
- The Emerald Forge (December 11, 2012)
Pilgrennon's Children contains examples of:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: The books seem to be set in the late 2010s.
- Abandoned Area: In the first book, Pilgrennon lives in hiding with Alpha and Peter, two of his creations, in an abandoned World War II base on a tiny, uninhabited island off the coast of Scotland. The base was obviously meant to be secret, and Pilgrennon doesn't know what its original purpose was.
- AB Negative: Dana has a rare blood type, which Jananin shares, allowing her to donate blood when Dana is found to be anemic from the forcible blood draw in The Emerald Forge.
- Adults Are Useless: Dana's teacher thinks she's pretending to be autistic in order to get away with misbehaviour and does nothing to protect her from bullies.
- Blind Without 'Em: When Pilgrennon, Jananin, and Dana secretly enter London in Pilgrennon's Beacon, Jananin is forced to take off her glasses, because she's a terrorism suspect and the photo of her includes the glasses. Without them, she's so blind that she has to hang onto Pilgrennon's arm.
- Camera Spoofing:
- When Pilgrennon, Jananin, and Dana break into the building where Cerberus's English computer is hidden in Pilgrennon's Beacon, Dana overrides the security camera feed with images of the empty corridor.
- She does the same thing to a school CCTV camera in The Emerald Forge so people won't know she and Eric are alone in the building after school.
- Character Tics: Dana walks with a shuffling gait, which her classmates make fun of.
- Chekhov's Gun: Dana has a broken fuse that was given to her by her foster father Graeme. At Roareim, her fuse is accidentally mixed up with Pilgrennon's good fuses, and he ends up using it to make his Compton bomb, meaning the bomb doesn't go off when it's supposed to, and the three have to manually destroy Cerberus.
- Cope by Creating: In The Emerald Forge, Dana has started making Airfix models, on her therapist's advice that she go somewhere quiet and do something she enjoys that takes up all her concentration whenever she gets upset.
- Designer Babies: Pilgrennon created most of his children by switching the eggs and sperm of people at fertility clinics with the eggs and sperm of autistic teens who went to his center. If the parents found the resulting children unmanageable, they would sometimes be returned to the center, where Pilgrennon could experiment on them all he liked. Meanwhile, he was working on a clone of himself that was modified to have autism genes, but when the clone was born, it died. Pilgrennon decided that he must have accidentally copied a fatal recessive and decided to combine the clone's DNA with Jananin's to create Dana and Cale. Jananin refers to his efforts as "eugenics experiments."Pilgrennon: If 50% of you is Jananin, then 49% is me, and the other one is all bits and ends from other people.
- Disappeared Dad: Eric mentions that his dad left, he doesn't know where, and that his parents never really knew each other.
- Dramatic Drop: Dana and Jananin are eating together when the TV starts showing a missing persons report about Dana. When a police image of Jananin appears on TV, Jananin drops her fork.
- Elective Mute: Cale is capable of speaking, but doesn't like to. Dana does most of the speaking for him.
- EMP: Compton bombs can overload electronic devices for miles around. When Pilgrennon first went into hiding, he set off a bomb that destroyed his research institute and fled in the chaos. There's worry that Cerberus will set off a bomb that will destroy the computers in Pilgrennon's children's brains, causing severe brain damage. Pilgrennon tries to use a bomb to destroy Cerberus's English computer, but it doesn't go off, thanks to a broken fuse. He uses another one to allow him, Jananin, and Dana to escape London undetected. The bomb kills Alpha, who was outside Pilgrennon's radiation-proof car thanks to a Good Samaritan who was concerned about children left unattended, and sets off a wave of crime and destruction for miles around. Pilgrennon sets off his last bomb while being pursued in a helicopter, destroying his helicopter as well as those of his pursuers so they won't be able to find Cerberus in the ocean.
- Enemy Mine: In Pilgrennon's Beacon, Pilgrennon, Jananin, and Dana are forced to work together to take down the supercomputer Cerberus, which manipulates votes for the government.
- Foster Kid: Dana and Cale's foster parents, Graeme and Pauline, are an uncommon positive example. They genuinely care about the kids, although Dana is still miserable with them because of her hellhole school.
- Full-Conversion Cyborg: The villains of The Emerald Forge have used Jananin's technology to place the brains and some of the body tissue of dolphins into mechanical wyvern bodies that Gamma can control with her mind.
- Gym Class Hell: Dana hates PE, partly because of having to change in front of people and see their revolting bodies, and partly because her classmates always call her names and hit her, supposedly as part of the subject.
- Heroic Fire Rescue: While the Emerald Forge is burning down, Gamma climbs a chimney to escape the flames. Dana flies to her on the wyvern's back and pulls her onto the wyvern. Too weighed down to fly, the wyvern enters a controlled descent and deposits both of them relatively unharmed on the ground.
- Human Shield: In Pilgrennon's Beacon, Jananin aims a rocket launcher at a helicopter that contains Pilgrennon and Dana. Pilgrennon grabs Dana and leans out of the helicopter with her to show Jananin there are children on board. Jananin fires anyway, because her desire for revenge is stronger than her concern for human life.
- Interrupted Suicide: While Gamma was a child in an abusive mental hospital, she broke out of her room at night, went into the bathroom, and attempted suicide by cutting her wrists with a disposable razor. She was found before she lost consciousness.
- It's All My Fault: In The Emerald Forge, Dana releases a bunch of experimented-on animals, which travel to Gamma's former mental hospital and set it on fire, killing dozens. Dana blames herself for the attack, but Jananin tells her that they were programmed to do it, and were probably going to be released soon anyway.
- Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Jananin interrogates Pilgrennon about Cerberus by kicking him in the crotch and then burning his arm with a hot poker, but Pilgrennon refuses to talk.
- Kids Are Cruel: Dana's classmate Abigail delights in tormenting her, and most of the other kids do whatever Abigail wants. Early in the book, Dana gets into a fight with Abigail and some of her cronies in the bathroom, falls, and suffers a concussion, which is how the device in her brain is discovered.
- Kids Driving Cars: While Dana is trying to find Pilgrennon's hideout in the first book, she steals a man's car and figures out how to drive it, with much trial and error. Luckily she's in a sparsely populated area, and manages to travel a number of miles before crashing.
- Married to the Job: Pilgrennon used to have a wife named Adrienne. She left him because he was too engrossed in his work as a child psychologist to realize that his marriage was falling apart, and also because she wanted kids and he was more interested in the autistic children he worked with than in having biological ones.
- Mercy Kill: In The Emerald Forge, Dana throws the "sphinx," a product of inhumane experiments, off a building because she knows from its signal that it doesn't want to live.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: The villains of The Emerald Forge conduct experiments on animals that include grafting a monkey's head onto a cat's body and grafting multiple cobra heads onto a Komodo dragon in order to satisfy Gamma's obsession with mythological creatures.
- Power Incontinence: Unlike Dana, Peter is unable to control the computer in his brain. He needs to wear a viking helmet most of the time to stop himself from destroying every computer around.
- The Power of Hate: During her Battle in the Center of the Mind with Cerberus, Dana draws on every horrible experience she's ever had, which gives her the strength to force two heads to kill each other and contaminate the third with her humanity.
- Punk in the Trunk: On Jananin's orders, Dana hides in the trunk of a man's car while he takes a ferry to the island where Pilgrennon is believed to be hiding.
- Sarcastic Confession: In The Emerald Forge, Eric pretends his Disappeared Dad was actually a spy and his mum was the Duchess of Essex, who put him up for adoption. Dana tells him that her father was a mad scientist who created her in a test tube before going into hiding in a secret bunker on a haunted island off Scotland. Eric says, "Seriously, that's really good. You should write a book or something. Or a computer game."
- Sealed Evil in a Can: The protagonists steal Cerberus's main computer from London, put in in a Faraday cage, and drop it into the ocean.
- Seeing Through Another's Eyes:
- Prendick, one of the villains of The Emerald Forge, lost both his eyes in an industrial accident. He can see through the eyes of one of Gamma's mind-controlled eagles, since both of them have computers in their brains. Gamma uses this to ensure his loyalty, as she can take away his sight at a moment's notice.
- When Dana rides a horse that also has a computer in its brain, she can feel its heartbeat and the dirt under its hooves, hear the flies buzzing in its ears, and see its panoramic view.
- Sickening "Crunch!": When Cerberus forces Alpha to attack Dana with a knife, Jananin kicks it out of her hand with a sickening crump.
- Soft Water: In Pilgrennon's Beacon, Dana is flung out of a helicopter over the ocean, and Jananin jumps after her. Both are uninjured.
- Spiteful Spit: In The Emerald Forge, the villain Sanderson spits on the floor while complaining about America, "land where a minority of intelligent people work in state-of-the-art facilities to advance scientific understanding, so their majority of obese illiterate religious-fundamentalist rednecks can have weapons of mass destruction to go with their fast food meals."
- Stalker with a Test Tube: Pilgrennon stole Jananin's ova to create Dana and Cale because she had Asperger's, and because she was a genius and Pilgrennon wanted her intelligence passed down to future generations.
- Tastes Like Purple: One effect of the titular beacon, which Pilgrennon set up to attract his children, is temporary synesthesia.Dana: I keep seeing telephones dialling. And hearing pictures.
- Technopath: Because Dana had her computer in her brain during the critical learning period of her infancy, she can interpret data from other computers as easily as information from her senses. She can use GPS data to navigate, copy test answers from school computers, and play a VR game without a headset, among other things.
- Tinfoil Hat: Dana, Peter, and Alpha spend part of Pilgrennon's Beacon wearing foil-lined hats so Cerberus won't be able to detect them.
- Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000: In The Emerald Forge, Eric and Dana play "Pillage and Burn III," where you loot villages and use what you find to make better weapons.
- What Are Records?: When Pilgrennon shows Dana an old computer with a mouse, Dana doesn't know what it is. She's used to using touchscreens with a stylus.
- Why Couldn't You Be Different?: Pilgrennon's obsession with autism comes from his older sister Lydia, who had undiagnosed Asperger's, to the embarrassment of their parents. When she regressed due to bullying, their parents thought she was insane and banned Ivor from playing with her. They took away her electronics set and all her books in the hopes that it would force her to be normal, but instead she just sat in her room and stared at nothing. After she was finally Driven to Suicide at fourteen, their parents threw out her belongings and never mentioned her again.
