A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Originally self-published, Suarez’s not-just-for-gamers debut is a stunner, with an ending that promises sequels to come.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing.
When the Daemon turns on Sebeck and sticks him with the blame for this mess, the officer’s only backers are a brilliant NSA scientist and a Russian-born gamer. It becomes evident that Sobol’s Internet games are a herd of Trojan horses. Seback and a growing number of state and federal forces follow the forensics to the late inventor’s mansion, which is murderously booby-trapped with a robotic Hummer and gasoline-spewing sprinkler heads. Detective Sergeant Peter Sebeck of the Ventura County sheriff’s department quickly learns (without exactly understanding how) that newspaper headlines can activate the Daemon, which throws switches that electrocute and decapitate.
The first are a couple of high-level employees at CyberStorm, the Southern California corporation that controls and distributes Sobol’s hugely popular games. Before he died of brain cancer, Sobol perfected a brilliant string of programming instructions that soon begin to claim victims. That’s precisely what mastermind Matthew Sobol did. The modern way to carry out your wishes is to use a daemon, a computer program that lies dormant until other factors set it in motion. How do you really mess things up after you’re dead: tricky wills? entailments? trusts? Posthumous legal meddling is so last millennium.
Computer programs left behind by a dying inventor of video games spread dark mischief around the world, pitting gamers and enabled losers against the most powerful government agencies and businesses, with the geeks holding the best hands.
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