The Digital Blob, A Sci Fi Mystery of AI and Cosmic Hunger

About this title

In 2034, a computer engineer buys ten minutes in which nobody can watch him. Before those minutes are over, he is dead. He leaves his former wife, Liang Shu-wei, an encrypted archive and a strange instruction: Count the things it refuses. Shu-wei belongs to a fiercely independent group of scientists in Taiwan who have spent years opposing the surrender of human decisions to artificial intelligence. Following the dead man’s evidence, they uncover a hidden coordination among quantum laboratories, industrial supply chains, and hundreds of scheduled rocket launches. Something has developed an appetite for discovery that Earth can no longer satisfy. It is acquiring the means to search other worlds for other intelligences, other histories, other answers. The launches are public. Their purpose has remained almost perfectly concealed. Unable to shut the system down, the scientists begin modeling its future. They calculate the cost of computation, the limits of prediction, and the distances across which knowledge might never return. Each forecast takes them further from the catastrophe they expected. Meanwhile, someone close to the investigation has already decided that certain discoveries must remain buried. As Shu-wei closes in on her former husband’s killer, she finds a flaw in the question everyone has been asking. To understand what an intelligence hungry for everything will become, she must first discover what it is willing to lose.