Scott Olson

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!

In my upcoming novel, Zero Day Ghost, my protagonist Emily and her friend Seymour visit or perhaps invade a friend’s house on Victoria Peak. The Peak, as it is sometimes locally known, is one of the most exclusive and valuable plots of land here on planet Earth. Tourists often reach it via tram, although driving or taking the city bus will get you there with better air conditioning.

The roads up there are narrow, winding, and often covered in a jungle canopy.

And the homes contain tycoons, politicians and financiers. One of the 3500 square foot townhomes below (there are five pictured) currently rents for more than $50K per month.

In Zero Day Ghost, Emily and Seymour visit a mansion that is in disrepair and scale the wall uninvited. I didn’t exactly find a real fixer on Victoria Peak, but I did find plenty of high walls that were grist for my imagination.

I chose to set a large portion of Zero-Day Ghost in Hong Kong because the city is so wonderful and unique. It’s a dense metropolis burdened with but also encircled and bejeweled by an immense quantity of parklands and mountains. These green spaces create contrast and beauty everywhere you look but also force residents to exist in the small habitable spaces squeezed between the natural ones.

It’s a water city, bordered by and constantly interacting with the harbors and shoreline that generated so much of its value and interest over the centuries.

Hong Kong’s unusual and sometimes tragic colonial history has also given it an incredible concentration of ethnicities, languages, and cultural influences, making it a powerful setting for storytelling.

And it’s a bustling city, filled with commerce, delicious foods, and unique goods that create endless interest and opportunities.

I love Hong Kong and hope that Zero-Day Ghost does it justice. The city itself is ever interesting and often in my thoughts. I will return there someday soon.

My upcoming novel, Zero-Day Ghost, uses the real-life Choi Hung Estate (彩虹邨, literally Rainbow Village or Rainbow Public Housing), as one of its locations. The complex, constructed in the 1960s, is a city unto itself, designed to hold over 40,000 people in 11 residential blocks with five schools, shops, restaurants and a basketball court.

In the novel, Emily, the protagonist, arrives with the goal of finding her cousin who is hiding somewhere within. I chose Choi Hung Estate due to its massive scale and also its striking appearance which changes based on your perspective. As she approaches the entrance Emily notices that “the rainbow illusion fades, challenged by the reality of peeling paint, dirty windows, and lengths of hanging laundry. “

Yet, while Emily’s cousin may not have kept her own apartment in the best of condition, Choi Hung Estate is no tenement. It’s a publicly-owned, middle-class city within a city, home to thousands of families, workers, and, increasingly, retirees.

Given it’s enduring fame and usefulness, the Hong Kong government will surely be evaluating the complex’s future and deciding how best to preserve and improve it for future generations.