Publisher's Synopsis
A dissident historian and an attorney-turned-photographer fall in love while taking on a rogue AI deleting buildings and monuments from the physical world whose counterpart photographs take up too much data in the digital cloud.
The Colosseum in Rome disappears overnight. No trace, no remnants. Then the Statue of Liberty vaporizes out of thin air, swallowing all those in the crossfire. People say they saw a dark cloud descend over Lady Liberty from afar, then take off like a hurricane in a disappearing act. While researching the disappearances and finding some odd coincidences along the way, Kicis, a rebellious historian, crosses paths with Anna, former attorney-turned photographer. Pulled to New York, then to Europe, the pair fall for one another as they try to uncover the forces behind the missing buildings and monuments. They must do so covertly, as world governments have imposed a ban on any undercover investigations into the disappearances; the deletions aka irremnantizations. The true culprit fueling the deletions comes to light as the elusive Developer X concedes that her pet AI program has gone astray and morphed into something autonomous, ever-growing, virtually omnipotent, and starved for data. She, herself, is on the run from authorities after whistleblowing about her AI gone astray while others are locked up for much lesser crimes. Kicis and Anna then take on separate globe-trots to discover the truths that authorities seem to be gagging, to defend themselves from techno-tyranny, and to stop any more carnage before the carnage reaches them too. Kicis enlists the help of hackers to fight off the AI before it purges everything... but how do you fight data? Especially data that wants to destroy the real-world counterparts of what takes up too much space in the cloud. Meanwhile, Anna fends off her jealous ex-boyfriend, a world-renowned photographer himself, as she tries to prove her innocence so she can rejoin Kicis in the fight. As the irremnantizations increase, their chances of seeing each other again dwindle. Has a tipping point been reached within the bounds of Earth's physical constraints and exploited by digital forces that seem larger than life? Or is it simply the beginning of the Datapocalypse?
