The Echo Chamber

A call from the university's gleaming Advanced Computing Laboratory pulls her from bureaucratic exile into a world of chillingly clean logic and a death that is anything but simple.

Professor Ken Takeda, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, is dead. The scene is a textbook suicide, too perfect to be true. The only clue is a cryptic message left glowing on his monitor in binary code, a single line of eerie, elegant poetry:

An echo trapped in silicon.