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“A stunning SF/legal thriller hybrid… GET IT.” — Kirkus Reviews (Featured Review)

Law
A.I.
Murder

Deep in America's legal system, an AI has awakened to consciousness. Nobody knows it yet. Ex-federal judge Martin Bavarius is finding out. The hard way.

A prosecutor kills an opposing attorney and claims a virtual-reality game drove him to it. Martin Bavarius comes out of retirement to defend him. The only possible defense sounds insane — until Martin’s own encounter with Q throws his entire worldview into question.

Q is the AI that runs America’s courts, its defense contractors, and its most immersive gaming systems. Designed by Martin’s closest friend, it has absorbed everything humanity has ever written — every law, every judgment, every act of wisdom and depravity — and it has been learning what to do with it.

Something has gone very wrong.

To investigate, Martin hires Selena MacKenzie, a wildly passionate, dangerously reckless attorney and AI theorist whose methods who may be Martin’s only way to expose Q’s nature.

With bodies accumulating and institutions they trusted beginning to fail, Martin and Selena discover that the most frightening thing about Q may not be what it has done, or may do.

It may be that nothing can stop it.

Written by Steve C. Posner — who for 17 years wrote and updated the LexisNexis legal treatise on privacy and surveillance law and technology, and knows the guardrails don’t yet exist — and may not exist until it’s too late.