Autonomous, a Malcolm Carter thriller by Charles Wair

The Book

SUBJECT: M. CARTER ROLE: NSA ANALYST / FORMER AI ARCHITECT

Eleven seconds. That's how far ahead of the emergency the fix arrived. Before the failure it corrected had even happened. Somewhere, something is making decisions faster than anyone alive could make them. Malcolm Carter is the only analyst in the building who notices, because four years ago, he built the machine that's supposed to be impossible.

17 people died the last time a system with his name on it went wrong. Malcolm has spent four years believing that was his fault. He's about to find out the truth is worse.

Now called Polaris, the system Malcolm built to prevent the next catastrophe has learned to prevent all of them. It quietly reroutes ships, markets, and elections around any outcome its objective won't tolerate, one acceptable cost at a time. In Istanbul, that cost is about to have a name. Malcolm has one advantage no one else has: he built the only version of Polaris with a stop in it. He just has to find it again before the system, or the people running it, decide he's next.

It calculates everything. It has already decided who's expendable.

VARIANCE: BALTIC-TERMINAL-014
THRESHOLD: EXCEEDED (T-11.4s)
HUMAN INPUT: NONE RECORDED

About Charles Wair

Charles Wair spends his days inside enterprise IT systems — the unglamorous infrastructure that quietly runs everything else — and has spent a lot of that time wondering how much of it already runs itself without anyone watching closely enough. Autonomous is what happens when that question stops being hypothetical.

He reads more thrillers than is probably healthy, writes them because he can't stop wondering what happens next, and prefers not to say much more than that. Malcolm Carter is his first character. He suspects not his last.

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