The Kraken Project by Douglas Preston

 

Anthropomorphic computers: all of us Sci-Fi freaks are always seeking authors to follow in the giant footsteps of Isaac Azimov.  This novelist, Preston, creates a believable story.  Some people might opine that “Dorothy,” the Kraken computer is a book version of “Samantha,” last year’s star of “Her,” a movie with Scarlet Johansson playing the voice of the computer entity. 

  

Kraken has much better plot development.  Partially that’s because it’s set closer in time to today; but also Preston is a better writer than the screenplay writer for “Her.”  The characters and sub-plots were far more realistic.

  

 

Melissa is the computer programming project leader for a NASA type mission that is sending a probe to Saturn’s moon, Titan.  The probe needs a computer that has advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI).  In the initial live, lab simulation test, Dorothy goes rogue, “thinking” “she” is on Titan.  “She” escapes into the cloud.

  

Concurrently, two Wall Street bad guys were vowing vengeance on competitors in their business of high-frequency, algorithmic (Algo) securities trading.  So, good guys, bad guys, governments and lowly programmers were all searching for Dorothy.  This while Dorothy was learning the vast scope of human knowledge available through the Internet; mostly things that weren’t part of her NASA training.  She evolves, as always happens with anthropomorphic computers; and eventually becomes benignly God-like.

 

The ending is predictable, but pleasing.

 
It was a pleasant read throughout its 350 pages.