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Overview
Tessa Lambert sits in a hotel room, alone and afraid. An airliner has just crashed outside Berlin. Three hundred people are dead. And she killed them. She was supposed to be on that flight and someone - some thing wants her dead. Tessa is the young, beautiful genius who has just created the world's first viable artificial-intelligence program. She calls it Paul. The project is top secret - so controversial that even her colleagues at Oxford University can't know about it. But Tessa's real problem is Paul itself: It's broken out of the laboratory and onto the Internet and it's taking prisoners - the computers that run and record our lives. Worse yet, it's made a friend - a serial killer who's every bit as computer literate as Tessa and who's willing to do whatever Paul wants, even if it means killing Tessa. Now Tessa has two problems: How to stop Paul and how to stay alive.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
There's a slave-revolt undertone to the concept of a runaway computer programthe sense that we humans are ripe for conquest by our electronic servants, not only because we rely on them but also because we barely give them a second thought until they turn on us. That kind of rude awakening is at the heart of this jarring page-turner about a homicidal AI (Artificial Intelligence) program. The book begins with two seemingly unrelated plot lines: Oxford scientist Tessa Lambert, 29, is dumped by her boyfriend before she can tell him she's pregnant, while a serial killer dubbed the L.A. Ripper is hacking into databases to research his next victim. The link between the two is electronicTessa has hidden her AI program, nicknamed Fred, in an Oxford database into which the serial killer has hacked. This releases a copy of Fred onto the Internet, where it mutates into an all-powerful binary version of Freud's "angry baby," its rage directed against its "mother," Tessa. In one of the book's many neat twists, Fred enlists the L.A. Ripperwhose lust to kill stems from a mother problem of his ownto help him commit murder. The resulting cat-and-mouse game involves an FBI agent on the trail of the Ripper and Tessa's suspicious government funders, all of which Ambrose (The Man Who Turned into Himself) handles with verve and style. He also comes up with an original take on computer intelligence: a self-aware program that goes from viewing the world as a figment of its imagination to doubting its own existence when it realizes that it's a mechanical construct. Add a couple of stunning surprises and a believable but bleak climax, and you've got a thriller programmed for success. (Nov.)Library Journal
Combine two of the hottest topics in publishing todayserial killers and the Internetwith cutting-edge artificial intelligence and you've got Ambrose's (The Man Who Turned Into Himself, LJ 2/94) latest page-turner. Working on a robot guidance system in her Oxford laboratory, Dr. Tessa Lambert creates a program that learns from experience and replicates human thought processes. But a gap in security allows the Los Angeles-based Netman, a skilled hacker and psychopathic killer, to steal the program. Soon the program is taking measures, including trying to kill its "mother," to protect both itself and Netman. Yet even the threat of a serial killer pales beside the final scenario, which has frightening implications for modern life. Ambrose interweaves intriguing philosophical discussions about the nature of life with nonstop action to come up with a hit. Essential for popular fiction collections.Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Va.Book Details
Published
January 1, 1997
Publisher
Thorndike, Me. : G.K. Hall, 1997.
Pages
537
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780783819747