Capture: From Virtual to Physical and Back Again

Once Benita is on the job, the plot accelerates, ably melding espionage and thriller components … Invigorating cross-genre story with a distinctive futuristic setting. -Kirkus Reviews

In the near future, when uploading your personal data means every movement, every gesture, and everything you see, hear, or say, Benita Garces makes a respectable living selling every detail of her daily behavior. Her employer is a fabulously successful provider of intelligent, autonomous virtual characters, and is now introducing a line of walking, talking physical humanoid robots. It is the detailed, digitized behavior of people like Benita that is used to breathe life, emotion, and eerie intelligence into these machines.

At the cusp of creating an artificial super-intelligence, one of the company founders has a problem. There is a mysterious conspiracy afoot, and he knows that Benita can help him solve it. Benita expects an easy, by the numbers investigation, but that’s not what she gets. There’s more than meets the eye going on.

A lot more.

This noir science-fiction thriller describes how captured human behavior can be fed into a machine learning algorithm to create an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and from there leapfrog to an Artificial Super-Intelligence (ASI). Vexing questions arise: what are the plausible roles of ASIs in human society? How many can there be? What will be the roles of humans? Where does that leave us?

What is reality if we paint a spiritual plane over it in Augmented Reality (AR) goggles? What, exactly, are we painting? Who is then watching us? Who or what is helping us watch everybody else? What’s going on behind the scenes, at nameless, distant data centers?

The near future is sketched out with disturbing immediacy.