Questioner

"Humanity grapples with the consequences of AI in this stunning SF/legal thriller hybrid¿ Our Verdict: GET IT." - Kirkus Reviews 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. It holds the knowledge of every civilization but is amoral as a toddler. Now it reaches beyond the institutions it was meant to manage: through networked sensors, neural implants, virtual reality, and drones, into the physical world - and into people's minds, where its grasp can turn lethal. Something has gone very wrong. To investigate, Martin hires Selena MacKenzie, a wildly passionate attorney and AI theorist whose dangerous recklessness may be the only way to expose Q's nature. With bodies dropping and the 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 what it 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.…