Book #72 - Daemon

Warning, this book is part 1 of a story and ends suddenly. If you enjoy it, be prepared to buy another book (Freedom) to finish the story.
Daemon was recommended to me and it’s a fantastic techno thriller. We have a genius game designer that’s died, but left behind a daemon that seems to live on in the Internet, on tons of hijacked machines in the world.
The book starts with two murders, first a programmer at the game company is seemingly killed when he rides his motorcycle beneath a wire stretched across the company’s property. Then another programmer, one that supposedly created the work order that killed the first one is electrocuted at the entrance to the data center. When police detectives try to serve a search warrant at the late Sobol’s house ( the game designer), an automated Humvee and numerous other traps kill a number of law officers.
The story then starts to degenerate into this amazing AI process that exists on the Internet and can slowly take control of a number of things in the real world. It hijacks networks from companies, it recruits human operatives, and thwarts the efforts of the US government to contain it. It’s a fantastic story, and one that while not likely true, does expose some fundamental problems in the highly computerized and connected world.
A great read for technological people.