I was on the original Amazon Alexa teams based in Seattle, Washington, and Sunnyvale, California, and helped to release the first Amazon Echo in March of 2014.
A big part of the Alexa architecture, even a decade ago, involved machine learning and neural networks, which allowed the device to understand the customer’s words and intent, as well as to produce a useful response. We joked that we were building the HAL 9000, and in fact, I took my team to watch 2001 A Space Odyssey when it played at the Seattle Cinerama’s 2013 70mm film festival.
My experience with Alexa’s machine-learning technology made me fairly certain that computers would soon be mimicking human intelligence to an incredible degree. And although AI in fiction is well-treaded territory, I found myself wanting to tell a story that was closer to reality than the nearly omnipotent Skynet. I wanted to imagine an imperfect, fallible, alien intelligence that wouldn’t have predictable motives or airtight reasoning because that’s what I saw in Amazon’s nascent electronic brain.
The result, after multiple false starts and several years of effort, is my first novel, Zero Day Ghost. It’s about Emily Hernandez, a former hacker turned NSA analyst, who is tasked with fighting an AI she helped build while she was still a criminal. The AI, known as APRIL, lives as fragments of intelligence distributed across millions of hacked computers. It operates under the control of Emily’s old crime boss and nemesis, Zahra Kartal, who has instructed the system to hunt Emily and remove her as an obstacle. Emily’s journey to neutralize APRIL leads her to Hong Kong, where she’s forced to confront unfinished business with Zahra, with the Chinese side of her family, and with her own life choices.
I’m in the final steps of publishing Zero Day Ghost and hope to announce how and where to buy it in the near future!