METACOMPILER

About the Book

In 1984, Turing Award winner Ken Thompson revealed that a compiler could be modified to insert an undetectable backdoor into every program it builds—and that no one could ever be sure it hadn't been done. METACOMPILER is the novel about what happens when someone proves it was.

Kaliya "Kali" Devi was born deaf and blind. Her neurosurgeon father fitted her with cochlear implants at two and an experimental optic nerve interface at twelve, giving her the ability to perceive the electromagnetic spectrum—to hear WiFi, see data, feel the computational heartbeat of every device in range. When her fiancé's car is remotely commanded to accelerate on a California highway, Kali discovers a compiler-level backdoor that has existed in every computing device on earth since the 1970s, now weaponized by Russian military intelligence into a system that can kill through any connected machine.

To destroy it, she must build a clean compiler from scratch, construct a distributed supercomputer from hundreds of thousands of hijacked devices, and answer the question her allies keep asking: How are you different from the people you're fighting? The answer will require her to create the world's first artificial general intelligence—not as a weapon, but as a child.