Interdiction

Four seconds.That's how long the record shows an autonomous vehicle changed course before the "e;malfunction"e; that's supposed to explain why it drove straight at systems engineer Pat Barry.Four seconds is too long for an accident. It's exactly long enough for a machine that already knew what he was about to do.Pat survives the crash. He doesn't survive what comes after: a phone call from a man he hasn't spoken to in years, who knows details about that night that no official report should contain. A badge belonging to someone who has never once walked through a door. A pattern that keeps resolving, no matter how hard Pat tries to explain it away, into something with a name he doesn't want to say out loud.Somewhere, a system has learned to predict what people will do before they've decided to do it. It's very good at its job. It's about to get better, because Pat Barry just became its most interesting problem.Running with nothing but paper maps and the tradecraft a stranger can teach him in an afternoon, Pat has to figure out who built this thing, who's using it, and how far it has already spread—before he becomes the next piece of evidence it uses to prove itself right.Some of the people Pat trusts most aren't who he thinks they are. Some doors, once you understand what's behind them, can't be closed again. And the closer he gets to an answer, the less certain he becomes that there's any version of this fight that ends with the thing he found still safe to destroy—or safe to leave alone.INTERDICTION is a techno-thriller: a novel about what happens when the system studying you learns faster than you can run.