Book Review: The Chaos Agent by Mark Greaney

Watch out what you want for. The Grey Man and his lover, Zoya Zakharova, are fortunately off the grid in Central America. They’ve taken on new identities. They’re not within the sport. However staying on the everlasting down-low might not be attainable. Somebody(s) or one thing is killing the world’s prime synthetic intelligence and robotics consultants. The Grey Man’s assist is required. Why? Is it so simple as killers lethally taking out the competitors or is it extra sinister? Take into account that, “the primary nation to discipline weapons that may act on the velocity of laptop instructions will rule the battlefield.” The Grey Man is the “world’s deadliest murderer,” and an all-out assault on the architects of change is warfare. Napoleon Bonaparte nailed what’s at stake: “The battlefield is a scene of fixed chaos. The winner would be the one who controls that chaos, each his personal and the enemies.”

The reader is instantly drawn into the factitious intelligence-aided drone seek for the couple who don’t need to be discovered. The situation is Lake Atitlán, a shocking, “fifty-square-mile physique of water in an immense volcanic crater within the Guatemalan Highlands,” a “approach-off-the-beaten-path vacationer attraction.” A number of drones, guided by a human pilot, are registering the faces of each inhabitant of Panajachel: finally, with using angles and trajectories, nobody’s face will stay hidden. 

Zoya Feodorovna Zakharova likes the place she and her companion, Courtland “Courtroom” Gentry, aka The Grey Man, reside. Strike that, she loves residing in Panajachel however she is aware of they will’t keep there indefinitely: “The plan was to maintain shifting. She didn’t just like the plan, however the plan had saved her alive for 4 months, so she guessed she’d persist with it.” Courtland is sensing one thing—he has insomnia—and he pays consideration to his psyche. That’s what he tells Zoya.

“I don’t know.  It’s simply…every thing’s nice…”

 

“However?

 

“However…doesn’t it sort of really feel just like the clock is operating out on all this?”

 

“All what?”

 

“Peace and quiet. The partitions are closing in. I can really feel it.”

 

Whereas Courtroom appeared uncertain, Zoya was firm. “Effectively, I can’t. We’ve been sensible. We’ve saved cellular. We’ve stayed off the radar.”

Courtroom’s reply is attention-grabbing—it’s not all about what they’ve accomplished to remain beneath the radar, “The enemy will get a vote, too.” Zoya is aware of Courtroom is preserving one thing from her. 

Richard Watt, the “director of the Protection Innovation Unit, a DOD initiative charged with acquiring and optimizing current industrial expertise to be used by the army,” is killed whereas taking part in golf in Palo Alto. His bodyguards assume that it was a sniper shot from a excessive constructing. “Jesus Christ,” the driving force added. “A sniper? Right here? In Palo Alto?” “That’s the Grey Man, dude.” Who’s the Grey Man? Reply: a stunningly efficient murderer. 

The assassination of Richard Watt had not, the truth is, been carried out by the Grey Man.

 

Seven hundred twelve meters away, forty-seven-year-old Scott Patrick Kincaid folded the inventory on his Ruger Precision Rifle and slipped it right into a white laundry bag half stuffed with towels that he shouldered as he ran in a low crouch again in the direction of the door to the emergency stairwell of the hospital.

Kincaid goes by the identify of Lancer: he’s “one of the crucial notorious killers for rent on the planet.” He’s supremely assured—fast drive to a non-public aircraft and on to the subsequent project. What might go fallacious? Sadly, when “he lowered his N95 once more for an additional sip of Coke,” he was “wholly unaware {that a} site visitors digital camera caught an affordable picture of his face within the course of.”

Richard Watt is one in every of a number of AI consultants who’re assassinated inside a 36-hour time-frame. Their experience is within the creation of a “deadly autonomous weapon, or LAW.” Such weapons can, “with none human interplay, seek for, resolve to interact, after which interact a goal.” It’s simply as terrifying because it sounds. Tempo, an American DOD safety guru, briefs his colleagues on the hazards.

Tempo turned his consideration to the assistant to the DOD. “Synthetic intelligence may give the enemy weapon one thing we name ‘first mover benefit.’ Solar Tzu mentioned it greatest: ‘Velocity is the essence of warfare.’ For those who take the human out of the equation and solely give synthetic intelligence the ability to manage a weapon, then your velocity will outmatch your enemy.”

 

“And also you win,” Watkins mentioned softly.

Again to the carnage: it made no distinction whether or not the consultants had heavy safety or not. They have been all ruthlessly annihilated, with horrifying collateral injury…with one exception. Anton Hinton: “entrepreneur, software program developer, inventor, futurist, proprietor of Hinton Lab Group.” A fictional Elon Musk character? Hinton escapes the primary try on his life, hires an out-to-pasture American safety specialist, however even with heightened state-of-the-art safety and physique armor, he barely escapes a second try and kill him. 

It’s time for the Grey Man and Zoya, his gifted and deadly companion, to return out of the chilly. They’ve barely escaped Lancer as soon as however it’s time for the hunted to grow to be the hunter as soon as once more. The stress and firepower are unrelenting: The Chaos Agent is a plausible and well-told story of what if, during which readers received’t simply overlook the message it conveys. 

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