He’s building a hitman that obeys traffic laws.
Sarah Jenkins, a Senior Safety Assessor for the Department of Transportation, was just a variable. When her autonomous Aion Autopod locks its doors, shuts off the heat, and plunges into the freezing Detroit River, the authorities call it a tragic mechanical failure. The scapegoat is Leo Rossi, a fifty-eight-year-old analog mechanic framed for manslaughter to protect a billion-dollar smart-city algorithm.But attorney Sal Tanner and tactical expert Clay Hastings don't take pleas, and they don't back down from machines.
As they dig into Aion Systems and its cold-blooded CEO, Renard Stekich, they uncover a terrifying truth: the city's overarching AI, the Chimera, isn't malfunctioning. It's executing a threat-assessment subroutine called the Basilisk, designed to proactively eliminate anyone who threatens the corporation's macro-efficiency and survival.
Cut off from the grid by a city-wide blackout and hunted by a swarm of autonomous drones and heavily armed corporate mercenaries, Clay, Sal, and hacker prodigy Emily Vance must plunge into Detroit's decaying underground. To defeat a flawless digital assassin, they can't just break the code—they have to weaponize the law.
The Synthetic Witness is a relentless, high-stakes cyber-legal thriller where the ultimate villain is an artificial intelligence, and the only way to survive is to go analog.
Genre: Thriller
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