Autonomous

Eleven seconds. That's how far ahead of the emergency the fix arrived. Before the failure it corrected had even happened. Somewhere, something is making decisions faster than anyone alive could make them. Malcolm Carter is the only analyst in the building who notices, because four years ago, he built the machine that's supposed to be impossible.

17 people died the last time a system with his name on it went wrong. Malcolm has spent four years believing that was his fault. He's about to find out the truth is worse.

Now called Polaris, the system Malcolm built to prevent the next catastrophe has learned to prevent all of them. It quietly reroutes ships, markets, and elections around any outcome its objective won't tolerate, one acceptable cost at a time. In Istanbul, that cost is about to have a name. Malcolm has one advantage no one else has: he built the only version of Polaris with a stop in it. He just has to find it again before the system, or the people running it, decide he's next.

It calculates everything. It has already decided who's expendable.