Category Archives: science fiction

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The Last Firewall
Minus Four Paragraphs

By the time a novel is done, from rough first drafts until final proofing, I’ve read it close to twenty times. However, the one of the best reads is when it’s finally Done, with a capital D, Done. That’s when I get to read it as a reader, not a writer. It usually happens a few weeks after it’s been published. I get a paperback copy that’s not already spoken for, and I hole up in a comfy chair or couch and start reading.

That happened with The Last Firewall this past weekend, when I had four days at the beach with my family.

But I was shocked to find a missing page in the paperback — and in one of the most exciting scenes, no less. I’m so sorry for the mistake!

Most copies sold so far have been the Kindle version, but for the thirty or so folks who have the paperback, you’re holding what we can hope will someday be a rare collector’s copy. 🙂

I will get the paperback copy fixed as soon as possible (and will clean up the other smaller mistakes I found as well.) In the meanwhile, if you get to the bottom of page 151, in the bar fight scene, these are the four missing paragraphs you’re looking for:

      Knowing the robot used the visual channel to attack, she instead built a three-dimensional wireframe from street and security cameras, calculated the bot’s location, and pointed the muzzle in the direction of the window.

      The three-inch rocket whooshed out, guidance fins snapping into position. It exited the bar at two hundred miles per hour and twisted hard, gunning for the bot.

      Cat’s wireframe fuzzed out, right in the middle where the robot should be, and the rocket veered off. Her heart sank as it exploded against a neighboring building.

      â€śCatherine Matthews,” boomed the robot. “Surrender. You are surrounded. I am a military-grade combat bot. You cannot hope to succeed and we do not wish to harm you.”

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Every once in a while, I read a book whose vision of the future makes me sit back and think Ah yes, this is how it will be. Accelerando by Charles Stross dealt with the acceleration of technological development. Daemon by Daniel Suarez depicted how a computer can manipulate the world around it.

Nexus and Crux, the two techothrillers from Ramez Naam, do that for neural implants, technology that provides an interface between our brains and the outside world.

I just read an advance review copy of Naam’s Crux, a sequel that follows tight on the heels of Nexus. (It will be available August 27th, but you can preorder a copy now on Amazon.) Both books revolve around a technology called Nexus, a nanotech drug that interfaces with the human brain. It allows a user to run apps in their brain, to exercise conscious control over their mood, augment their intelligence, and communicate telepathically with other Nexus users.

But even as this all-powerful technology improves the lives of millions by fixing debilitating mental illnesses, helping monks meditate, by facilitating more powerful group consciousness and thought, it is also restricted by governments, abused by criminals, and leads to power struggles.

Crux is an adrenaline filled ride through the near-term future. Set on a global stage in a near-future world where the United States tries to tight restricts technology through shadowy intelligence organizations, Nexus and Crux run the gamut of post-human technology: human-brain uploads, military body upgrades, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, but the definite star of the show is the Nexus drug and its impact on increasing the power of the human mind.

I recommend both books, although Crux won’t make sense without the setup of Nexus, so go read both. You’ll be left realizing the future will look much like Ramez Naam’s books, full of both beautiful and very scary possibilities.

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Now that The Last Firewall is out, I’ve been asked what order to read the books in. There’s no one right answer, and that’s because each novel is a completely independent, self-contained story. They’re set in the same universe, have some shared characters and there is a chronological order, but you could pick up any book and enjoy it. That being said, here are my recommendations:

  • If you’re new to my science fiction, I suggest starting with The Last Firewall. If you love it, then go back and read Avogadro Corp, then A.I. Apocalypse, as prequels. There aren’t any huge spoilers, and The Last Firewall is the most accessible and polished of the three novels.
  • If you’re a stickler for reading things in chronological order, or if your job involves programming or supporting computers, then go ahead and start with Avogadro Corp, then A.I. Apocalypse, and finish with The Last Firewall.
  • And if you’ve already read Avogadro Corp and liked it, then read A.I. Apocalypse before you go on to The Last Firewall.

To get your copy, see the Where To Buy matrix.

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To celebrate the release of The Last Firewall, I decided to do another article about the technology behind the books. I wrote about the technology behind Avogadro Corp a few months ago, and that turned out to be fairly popular, so I’m back with the technology behind A.I. Apocalypse. (I don’t want to do The Last Firewall yet, because that would give away too many spoilers.) Although I don’t say so explicitly in the books, Avogadro Corp is set in 2015, A.I. Apocalypse in 2025, and The Last Firewall in 2035. I make all the technology as plausible as possible. That means it either exists, or is in development, or can be extrapolated from current technology. I described how I extrapolate tech trends and predict the future.

    • Semi-autonomous cars: In an early scene of the novel, Leon runs across the street, trusting that the cars will automatically stop due to their mandatory “SafetyPilots”. As we know, Google has an autonomous car, and car manufacturers, such as Toyota, are working on them now. Many manufacturers are starting with small pieces of autonomy: maintaining location within a lane, maintaining the distance from the car ahead of them. Fully autonomous vehicles are clearly more expensive than partially autonomous vehicles, so it’s quite reasonable we’ll see collision avoidance technology before we see fully autonomous vehicles. Our safety conscious culture and insurance risk reduction could result in such technology being mandatory within ten years.
Autonomous copter from 3D Robotics
    • Autonomous package delivery drones: Leon and his friends make their escape from a burning city via an unmanned package delivery plane. These are very feasible. Autonomous flying planes are very popular among hobbyists now. Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired, left to form 3D Robotics, who manufactures auto-pilot systems. Fuel efficiency is partly a function of flight speed. It makes sense that in a more fuel efficient future, we want to convey packages at just the right speed: not faster than they need to get there. When human pilots are removed from the picture, package delivery drones can become an economical way to move goods.
    • Solar-powered flight: Also feasible, the first long-distance flights using solar power have already taken place. There are solar powered airships, solar powered quadcopter, solar powered fixed wing surveillance drone, and a long duration solar powered drone. The attraction to solar power includes indefinite flight time and low cost of flight. The drone Leon and his friends take has to land before dark, but that wouldn’t necessarily be the case in real life: most drones would contain battery power to allow them to maintain sufficient altitude at night (although they might lazily drift and trade-off some elevation during the dark hours).
    • Mobile Phones as Computers: Leon and his friends own phones that work as both smartphone and computer by synchronizing their output to nearby display and input devices. This is similar to the Ubuntu Edge, which can be used as a full computer or phone. While computing power is increasing all the time, one of the constraints is displays. Phones can’t just grow indefinitely larger. Flexible screens might help, but still have limitations. The solution in the novel is the availability of cheap, high resolution displays nearly everywhere. By knocking your device against them, the phone and screen exchange a handshake that then permits the wireless display of data. Bump does this sort of synchronization now for exchanging contacts, files, and other data. Air Display creates a wireless remote display for iOS/OSX devices. One Amazon reviewer knocked A.I. Apocalypse for failing to foresee Google
      Google Glass projector/prism system

      Glasses. At the time I wrote the manuscript, they hadn’t been invented yet. It’s still not clear to me whether this will be the future or not. Glass could be yet another type of screen (after desktop monitor, tablet, and mobile phone screen), and while it offers certain conveniences (always there, relatively unobtrusive) it’s still a very small screen (many call it tiny) that’s more suitable for the display of summary information than for an immersive experience. That may change over time, such that we see full-screen glasses.

    • Evolutionary Computer Viruses: One of the main themes of the novel is that artificial intelligence will evolve rather than be programmed. I’ve braved surveillance by the NSA to research current articles on evolutionary computer viruses. (Don’t try this at home, kids.)  Computer Virus Evolution Model Inspired by Biological DNA is a research paper describing the idea in more detail that concludes “The simulation experiments were conducted and the results indicate that computer viruses have enormous capabilities of self-propagation and self-evolution.” The Frankenstein virus was a self-assembling and evolving computer virus put together by two researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas.
    • Pilfering existing code to build a virus: Yup, the Frankenstein virus does that too.
    • Humanoid robots: Later in the novel, the virus AI embody several humanoid robots. ASIMO is a long-running research project by Honda. Part of the reason Japan does research into humanoid bots (as opposed to other, more utilitarian designs) is that they see the use of robots as essential in caring for their growing elderly population. Even in the United States, we’re starting to see more research into humanoid form robots. That’s because robots need to navigate structures and tools designed for the human form. If you need to go up stairs, open doors, or use utensils, the human form works. If you look at the DARPA

      robotics research challenge, you see humanoid robots being used, such as ATLAS, from Boston Dynamics. The same folks who brought us the scary looking Big Dog bring the even scarier looking ATLAS. (ASIMO is so cuddly by comparison.) Since the DARPA challenge requires the robot to negotiate human spaces (e.g. to go into a nuclear reactor and shutdown equipment), it takes a humanoid form to succeed at the challenge. Boston Dynamics has a ton of experience in this space. Their earlier PETMAN robot is also worth looking at.

    • Mesh networking: In the novel, Avogadro Corp (a thinly disguised Google) has deployed Mesh networking every to guarantee net neutrality. Mesh networking is real and exists today. I think it would be a great solution to the last mile bottleneck. Google Fiber is proof that Google cares about the connection to the end-user. They just happened to have chosen a different technology to achieve the same result. Fiber is coming to Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah after starting in Kansas City, so clearly Google wants to continue the experiment. Unfortunately, commercial use of mesh networking seems to have been relegated to creating networks for legacy hotels and similar buildings. But I think there’s promise for consumers: Project Byzantium is a mesh network based on the Raspberry Pi for the zombie apocalypse. The low cost of the Raspberry Pi is awesome, but we should see even lower cost, smaller size, and lower power consumption solutions as time goes by. Then it becomes easy to sprinkle these all around, creating ad-hoc mesh networks everywhere.
    • Internet Kill Switch: A late plot point involves a master password embedded in all network routers. While this doesn’t exist in reality, in the context of the novel, Avogadro Corp has basically given away mesh boxes and routers for years, and they’ve effectively become the sole provider of routers. Historically speaking, many routers come with default passwords, and many people don’t change them. Thanks to all the recent disclosures around the NSA spying on Americas, we know there are more backdoors than ever into computer systems around the world. I think it’s within the realm of feasibility that if you had one company providing all the routers, that there could exist a backdoor to exploit them all. (Of course, how the kill signal propagates around the internet is another question.)
  • ELOPe’s Plane: This was modeled after Boeing’s X-37b. It’s pretty far-fetched that this could be considered a multi-mission military plane, but it’s what I had in mind visually. Think of the X-37b being 50% larger, wings large enough to make it aerodynamically appropriate for sustained flight, and the payload section holding a small number of passengers, and you’ve basically got ELOPe’s white unmarked plane.
  • Rail gun: PA-60-41 uses a rail gun to shoot down the incoming military attack. Rail guns exist of course, although why one would be in downtown Chicago is questionable.
  • Lakeside Technology Data Center: As the time of writing, Lakeside Technology was the world’s largest data center. It’s now the third largest. It does have a distinguishing cooling tower that was the target of ELOPe’s attack.
  • Evolving General Purpose AI: The biggest leap in the book, of course, is that general purpose AI could evolve from simple computer viruses to sophisticated intelligences that communicate, trade, and form a civilization complete with social reputation. As much as possible, I matched the evolution of biological life: from single cell organisms to multicellular life, learned intelligence vs. evolved intelligence, etc. For this reason, I think it’s inevitable that will eventually occur: it’s just life evolving on a different substrate. (It’s probably not reasonable that it could happen so quickly, however.)
Hopefully I haven’t missed anything huge. If I have, just let me know in the comments, and I’ll address it. If you enjoyed Avogadro Corp or A.I. Apocalypse, I hope you’ll check out my latest novel The Last Firewall. 

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I’d like to announce that The Last Firewall is available!

In the year 2035, robots, artificial intelligences, and neural implants have become commonplace. The Institute for Applied Ethics keeps the peace, using social reputation to ensure that robots and humans don’t harm society or each other. But a powerful AI named Adam has found a way around the restrictions. 

Catherine Matthews, nineteen years old, has a unique gift: the ability to manipulate the net with her neural implant. Yanked out of her perfectly ordinary life, Catherine becomes the last firewall standing between Adam and his quest for world domination. 

Two+ years in the making, I’m just so excited to finally release this novel. As with my other novels, I explore themes of what life will be like with artificial intelligence, how we deal with the inevitable man-vs-machine struggle, and the repercussions of using online social reputation as a form of governmental control.

The Last Firewall joins its siblings. 
Buy it now: Amazon Kindle, in paperback, and Kobo eReader.
(Other retailers coming soon.)

I hope you enjoy it! Here is some of the early praise for the book:

“Awesome near-term science fiction.” – Brad Feld, Foundry Group managing director

“An insightful and adrenaline-inducing tale of what humanity could become and the machines we could spawn.” – Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger

“A fun read and tantalizing study of the future of technology: both inviting and alarming.” – Harper Reed, former CTO of Obama for America, Threadless

“A fascinating and prescient take on what the world will look like once computers become smarter than people. Highly recommended.” – Mat Ellis, Founder & CEO Cloudability

“A phenomenal ride through a post-scarcity world where humans are caught between rogue AIs. If you like having your mind blown, read this book!” – Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

“The Last Firewall is like William Gibson had a baby with Tom Clancy and let Walter Jon Williams teach it karate. Superbly done.” – Jake F. Simons, author of Wingman and Train Wreck

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Cover for The Last Firewall

It’s a very exciting time in the lifecycle of a book.

Here’s a quick peek at the cover for The Last Firewall. We may make a few tweaks, but that’s the general layout.

We’re still targeting a mid-August release. I’m working with my designer, the wonderful Maureen Gately, on the interior pages right now.

I’ll soon start generating the ebook versions for Kindle, Kobo, and other ereaders.

In a few spare moments here and there, I’m reading Ramez Naam’s upcoming Crux, which is great, and will be out on August 27th. I’ll have a full review next month. It’s a sequel to his first novel, Nexus. If you haven’t read Nexus, go get a copy now.

I’m also getting ready to speak at Willamette Writers Convention on August 1st. If you’re attending, check out my session on Friday from 1:30 to 3pm (PDF of schedule).

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The online world is buzzing with news of Elon Musk’s hyperloop, a very fast transportation system that could take people from LA to NY in under an hour. Elon will reveal the details of the system on August 12th, as he mentioned on Twitter.

He’s been talking about it for over a year, and has said:

“This system I have in mind, how would you like something that can never crash, is immune to weather, it goes 3 or 4 times faster than the bullet train. It goes an average speed of twice what an aircraft would do. You would go from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes. It would cost you much less than an air ticket than any other mode of transport. I think we could actually make it self-powering if you put solar panels on it, you generate more power than you would consume in the system. There’s a way to store the power so it would run 24/7 without using batteries. Yes, this is possible, absolutely.”

This widely shared concept photo is actually the Aeromovel, a pneumatic train system:

It’s pretty awesome stuff.

Small spoiler alert! Don’t read further unless you want to see a tiny bit of a scene from the last half of The Last Firewall.

Now the one problem with writing near-term science fiction is that stuff keeps coming true before I can get the books out. In this case, I have a vactrain in The Last Firewall. Leon and Mike must hijack the train to avoid detection. Here’s part of the scene where they discuss it:

“Now how do we get to Tucson?” Leon asked. â€śWe are not driving again.”
Mike stared off into space. “I have an idea: the Continental.”
The super-sonic subterranean maglev was an early gift from AI-kind to humans, running in a partial vacuum at a peak of three thousand miles an hour.
“The train only stops in LA and NY,” Leon said. “And besides, we’ll be listed on the passenger manifest.”
“There are emergency exits.” Mike pushed a link over in netspace. “And with your new implant, can you hack the manifest?”
Leon glanced at the shared news article, accompanied by a photograph of a small concrete building peeking out of a cactus covered landscape.
“Marana, Arizona, about a half hour north of Tucson,” Mike said. “Emergency egress number three.”
“So we hop on the Continental and trigger an emergency stop when we’re near the exit?”
“Exactly,” Mike said. “Think that hopped-up implant of yours can fool some train sensors?”

It’s one of my favorite bits of technology in the book, and I was daydreaming about it before I even starting writing the first draft. Now thanks to Elon Musk, we may all get to ride in it.

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I know I’ve gone dark over the last few months. I’m sure that’s left many people wondering about the status of The Last Firewall, my third Singularity novel.

I’m delighted to announce that The Last Firewall will be available this summer. I’m targeting an August launch. 
So why the long wait?

As you may know, my previous novels are all self-published. They’ve sold well, but I often wondered how many more readers might find my books if I went with a traditional publisher.
In addition, many folks have asked “When will we see the movie version?” about Avogadro Corp and A.I. Apocalypse, but very few self-published novels have made that leap. Hollywood often judges potential movie options by the interest publishers take in novels. That was another reason why I was interested in traditional publication.
I started working with a literary agent who saw great promise in The Last Firewall, but wanted substantial revisions. I subsequently worked on The Last Firewall for another eight months until it gleamed brighter than the titanium shell of a robot.
That’s where I’ve been for a while, and I think the results are great: I’m convinced it reads better than anything I’ve done before, and a few other folks have read the manuscript and agree.
However, traditional publishing is a tough nut to crack, and if I persist with that path, The Last Firewall will continue to languish on my computer when it really wants to be read.
So I’m self-publishing The Last Firewall, as I have my other novels. It’s worked great in the past, and I’m happy to be going this route again. I’m choosing cover images and working on cover design right now, even as the manuscript undergoes a final round of proofreading.

I think it’s going to be awesome, and can’t wait to get it in your hands. If you haven’t done so, sign up for the mailing list and I’ll let you know when it’s available. 

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1. Diagram from Google’s patent
application for floating data centers.

The technology in Avogadro Corp and A.I. Apocalypse is frequently polarizing: readers either love it or believe it’s utterly implausible.

The intention is for the portrayal to be as realistic as possible. Anything I write about either exists today as a product, is in active research, or is extrapolated from current trends. The process I use to extrapolate tech trends is described in an article I wrote called How to Predict the Future. I’ve also drawn upon my twenty years as a software developer, my work on social media strategy, and a bit of experience in writing and using recommendation engines, including competing for the Netflix Prize.

Let’s examine a few specific ideas manifested in the books and see where those ideas originated.

    • Floating Data Centers: (Status: Research) Google filed a patent in 2007 for a floating data center based on a barge. The patent application was discovered and shared on Slashdot in 2008. Like many companies, filing a patent application doesn’t mean that Google will be deploying ocean-based data centers any time soon, but simply that the idea is feasible, and they’d like to own the right to do so in the future, if it becomes viable. And of course, there is the very real problem of piracy.
Pelamis Wave converter in action.
    • Portland Wave Converter: (Status: Real) In Avogadro Corp I describe the Portland Wave Converter as a machine that converts wave motion into electrical energy. This was also described as part of the Google patent application for a floating data center. (See diagram 1.) But Pelamis Wave Power is an existing commercialization of this technology. You can buy and use wave power converters today. Pelamis did a full-scale test in 2004, installed the first multi-machine farm in 2008 off the coast of Portugal, is doing testing off the coast of Scotland, and is actively working on installing up to 170MW in Scottish waters.
Pionen Data Center. (Src: Pingdom)
    • Underground Data Center: (Status: Real) The Swedish data center described as being in a converted underground bunker is in fact the Pionen data center owned by Bahnhof. Originally a nuclear bunker, it’s housed nearly a hundred feet underground and is capable of withstanding a nuclear attack. It has backup power provided by submarine engines and triple redundant backbone connections to the Internet and fifteen full-time employees on site.
    • Netflix Prize: (Status: Real) A real competition that took place from 2006 through 2009, the Netflix Prize was a one million dollar contest to develop a better recommendation than Netflix’s original Cinematch algorithm. Thousands of people participated, and hundreds of teams beat Netflix’s algorithm, but only one team was the first to better it by 10%, the required threshold for payout. I entered the competition and realized within a few weeks that there were many other ways recommendation engine technology could be put to use, including a never-before-done approach to customer support content that increased the helpfulness of support content by 25%.
    • Email-to-Web Bridge: (Status: Real) At the time I wrote Avogadro Corp, IBM had a technical paper describing how they build an email-to-web bridge as a research experiment. Five years later, I can’t seem to find the article anymore, but I did find some working examples of services that do the same thing. In fact, www4mail appears to have been working since 1998.
    • Decision-Making via Email: (Status: Real) From 2003 to 20011, I worked in a position where everyone I interacted with in my corporation was physically and organizationally remote. We interacted daily via email and weekly via phone meetings. Many decisions were communicated by email. They might later be discussed in a meeting, but if a communication came down by a manager, we’d just have to work within the constraints of that decision. Through social engineering, it possible to make those emails even more effective. For example, employee A, a manager, is about to go on vacation. ELOPe sends an from employee A to employee B, explaining a decision that was making, and asking employee B to handle any questions for that decision. Everyone else receives an email saying the decision was made, and ask employee B if there are questions. The combination of an official email announcement plus a very real human contact to act as point person becomes very persuasive. On the other hand, some Googlers have read Avogadro Corp, and they’ve said the culture at Google is very different. They are centrally located and therefore do much more in face to face meetings.
Foster-Miller Armed Robot
(Src: Wikipedia)
  • iRobot military robots: (Status: Real) iRobot has both military bots and maritime bots, although what I envisioned for the deck robots on the floating data centers is closer to the Foster-Miller Talon, an armed, tank-style robot. The Gavia is probably the closest equivalent to the underwater patrolling robots. It accepts modular payloads, and while it’s not clear if that could include an offensive capability, it seems possible.
  • Language optimization based on recommendation engines:  (Status: Made Up) Unfortunately, not real. It’s not impossible, but it’s also not a straightforward extrapolation. There’s hard problems to solve. Jacob Perkins, CTO of Weotta, wrote an excellent blog post analyzing ELOPe’s language optimization skills. He divides the language optimization into three parts: topic analysis, outcome analysis, and language generation. Although challenging, topic analysis is feasible, and there are off-the-shelf programming libraries to assist with this, as there also are for language generation. The really challenging part is the outcome analysis. He writes:

    “This sounds like next-generation sentiment analysis. You need to go deeper than simple failure vs. success, positive vs. negative, since you want to know which email chains within a given topic produced the best responses, and what language they have in common. In other words, you need a language model that weights successful outcome language much higher than failure outcome language. The only way I can think of doing this with a decent level of accuracy is massive amounts of human verified training data. Technically do-able, but very expensive in terms of time and effort.

    What really pushes the bounds of plausibility is that the language model can’t be universal. Everyone has their own likes, dislikes, biases, and preferences. So you need language models that are specific to individuals, or clusters of individuals that respond similarly on the same topic. Since these clusters are topic specific, every individual would belong to many (topic, cluster) pairs. Given N topics and an average of M clusters within each topic, that’s N*M language models that need to be created. And one of the major plot points of the book falls out naturally: ELOPe needs access to huge amounts of high end compute resources.”

    This is a case where it’s nice to be a science fiction author. 🙂

I hope you enjoyed this post. If you have any other questions about the technology of Avogadro Corp, just let me know!