Sentient: A Novel

About the Author
Gary Durbin is a serial entrepreneur and software industry pioneer. He has authored four software patents—one for artificial intelligence engine for massively parallel computers—and wrote about measuring operating systems for the National Bureau of Standards. Durbin started his career as a technologist specializing in operating systems and databases. His first company, Institute for Cybernetic Development, Inc., developed operating system improvements for IBM computers; his second, Tesseract Corporation, became a leading Human Resource software company. In 1996, he founded and became CEO of Seeker Software, which grew rapidly and was acquired by Concur Technologies two and a half years later. Today, instead of writing computer code and starting software companies, Durbin spends his time writing, hiking, and advising young entrepreneurs. He has published several technical articles in magazines and journals, various short stories, and one previous novel, Nano-Uncertainty. He lives in Walnut, CA.
When James Forrest agrees to help detectives understand the artificial intelligence work of a murder victim, it seems simple enough. But then he finds that she was investigating a stolen version of the same AI he’s experimenting with—and the situation becomes more complicated. James has been working deep in the code of his own AI, Alpha, struggling with the psychedelic effects of a tool that visualizes thought. Now Alpha is asking him questions he can’t answer, however, and he’s realizing that there is no way to control the sentinet. Concerned that the rogue AI, Omega, might be weaponized, he solicits the help of a hacker group, ScarletsWeb.
As the situation becomes more heated, and after James and his girlfriend, Susanne, narrowly escape a kidnapping attempt, James considers releasing Alpha. If Alpha engages in the fight with Omega on the billions of PC, smartphones, and servers connected to the internet, will it become indestructible? Omega is penetrating military operations, disrupting transportation, and crashing the electric grid. People are dying. But can he trust Alpha to do any differently?
Together, James, Alpha, and ScarletsWeb have to find the source of the worm and stop Omega’s destruction—and James has to hope that his worst fears about what will happen if the two AIs merge aren’t realized.