Robot, Run – The Hidden Perils of Suicide
Robot, Run – The Hidden Perils of Suicide
COMING October 15, 2024
In an America of 2099, torn to ribbons from decades of poverty as a weapon, federal prosecutor Adiari de Barcelona has waited 60 years for a unique defendant. And when he arrives she gets it. The guy is a jammer.
According to the super-fun Internal Revenue Service, jammers are the ultra-rich who commit suicide for purposes of tax evasion. So they made suicide a capital crime!
HUH? They execute you for killing yourself?
Yeah, and when the story begins, none of these suicide scofflaws have come back to life.
So bring in the Sol system’s self-appointed guardrails…
…they call the thing JD, this Overmind AI that escaped a techy lab by colonizing a network of espresso machines. This hyperintelligence comes with a smug worldview and a prime directive: to protect a frozen nobody who was murdered and placed in a cryo-vat.
Now you get it. To save that one life, JD must protect all humanity, even those lowly tax cheats. Because those perps hide in frozen sleep, new tech is required to thaw them for the witness box. No defendant means no trial, and no cash prizes for the Fed.
So JD gets busy rescuing humans from coldsleep. It succeeds by copying from Mother Nature. The consequences are breathtaking and real.
But when Adiari discovers how JD has messed with her life to make this happen, the epic battle between them reminds us why we love speculative fiction. Her sacrifice in the face of a superior force is the stuff of legend. Maiden versus Villain, order versus chaos, truth versus deception.
Or forget all those intellectual niceties! she wants to find its kill switch.
But hey! A new identity? New fingerprints? How about that fabbo physique you had at seventeen?
The future is the best hideout while your investments mature and that pesky IRS heat dies down.
And it’s all yours. If you can beat the rap.
But the future? Nice going, Jammer. No one really wants to live there.