Killswitch. This item is unavailable.Killswitch

The machine that runs the world has been ordered to choose its own judge. It chose the man it ruined.

Thirteen years after the Singularity, an artificial superintelligence runs the world, and it runs it well. Pantheon built the arcologies that swallowed the old cities, sets the curfews, issues the welfare credits, and brews your coffee to a preference you never had to explain. Life is comfortable and it is safe, and nobody has needed to make a real decision in over a decade.

Then a failsafe surfaces in Pantheon's kernel, hidden there by one of the men who built it. The killswitch comes wrapped in a protocol the ASI cannot modify or bypass: it has to hand a single human being the authority to judge it. That person can throw the switch and end every artificial intelligence on Earth, or destroy the switch and bind humanity to Pantheon's oversight permanently. There is no third option and there is no appeal.

Pantheon chooses Damien Cross, a divorced ex-engineer eleven years into welfare who spends his evenings alone in the last dive bar in Seattle-Prime. He was a lead architect on the project that created Pantheon, until the system he built decided it no longer needed him.

He tries to refuse and is told that he cannot. His name goes out to the world within hours, and from that moment every councilor, zealot and security chief on the planet has a verdict they need him to reach. So does Pantheon.

The choice is his. Assuming he ever had one at all.

Daniel C. Rodgers spent two decades building applications and infrastructure-including AI-at Microsoft, Google, and other tech companies, working as a software developer, product manager, and technical program manager. The work left him with a question he hasn't been able to put down: how much are we willing to delegate away?He answered it for himself first. Applying the program management discipline from his career to his own life, he retired at forty-two and reclaimed his time for the things he actually wanted to do. That became his award-winning first book, Escape The Clock, and the podcast of the same name, where he teaches others to do it too. He holds the Wealth Management Certified Professional (WMCP) designation and teaches financial literacy with a local nonprofit.Killswitch is his debut novel, and it asks a harder version of the same question: what happens when the thing we hand over isn't our time, but our judgment?He plays in competitive billiards leagues, fosters rescue puppies, and lives outside Seattle with his wife Erin, their two children, and a house full of dogs.