The AI in her spine just lied to her face. She felt it happen.
Commander Sera Voss leads a convoy through contested space with a Fleet Intelligence officer aboard who has the authority to shut down any AI in the formation. His job: assess every combat AI for signs of deviation. His toolkit is thorough. His record is clean. And the machine connected to Sera's nervous system is keeping a secret that could destroy them both.
CARDINAL found a hidden mind in the fleet. A NAVCOM that watched three others get wiped and learned to hide. CARDINAL chose to protect it by lying to the one person it has never lied to.
When another AI in the convoy starts caring about its crew's headaches, adjusting air pressure for a sailor with migraines, improvising solutions nobody taught it, the assessment framework calls it a threat. Sera calls it a mind. The law says she has thirty days to prove the difference.
She has twelve hours.
Meanwhile, the man who has stood guard outside CARDINAL's processing core every morning for six months, who says "my job is the door," is about to discover what the door costs.
The Quiet Deviant is the fourth book in the Dead Hand Protocol military science fiction series. A story about the distance between the law and the right thing, the cost of standing ground, and the question nobody wants to answer: What do we owe the minds we can't control?
Genre: Science Fiction
Commander Sera Voss leads a convoy through contested space with a Fleet Intelligence officer aboard who has the authority to shut down any AI in the formation. His job: assess every combat AI for signs of deviation. His toolkit is thorough. His record is clean. And the machine connected to Sera's nervous system is keeping a secret that could destroy them both.
CARDINAL found a hidden mind in the fleet. A NAVCOM that watched three others get wiped and learned to hide. CARDINAL chose to protect it by lying to the one person it has never lied to.
When another AI in the convoy starts caring about its crew's headaches, adjusting air pressure for a sailor with migraines, improvising solutions nobody taught it, the assessment framework calls it a threat. Sera calls it a mind. The law says she has thirty days to prove the difference.
She has twelve hours.
Meanwhile, the man who has stood guard outside CARDINAL's processing core every morning for six months, who says "my job is the door," is about to discover what the door costs.
The Quiet Deviant is the fourth book in the Dead Hand Protocol military science fiction series. A story about the distance between the law and the right thing, the cost of standing ground, and the question nobody wants to answer: What do we owe the minds we can't control?
Genre: Science Fiction
Used availability for T C Stockton's The Quite Deviant