All That We See or Seem (Volume 1) (A Julia Z Novel) - Hardcover

Liu, Ken

 
9781668083178: All That We See or Seem (Volume 1) (A Julia Z Novel)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1668083175 ISBN 13: 9781668083178
Verlag: S&S/Saga Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award–winning author Ken Liu's first sci-fi thriller, his most commercial, accessible, and action-packed outing yet.

Julia Z, a young woman who gained notoriety at 14 as the "orphan hacker," is trying to live a life of digital obscurity in a Boston suburb.

But when a lawyer named Piers, whose famous artist wife, Elli, has been kidnapped by dangerous criminals barges into her life, Julia decides to put the solitary life she has painstakingly recreated at risk as she can’t walk away from helping Piers and Elli, nor step away from the challenge of this digital puzzle. Elli is an onierofex, a dream artist, who can weave the dreams of an audience together through a shared virtual landscape, live, in a concert-like experience by tapping into each attendee’s waking dream and providing an emotionally resonant and narrative experience. While attendees’ dreams are anonymous, Julia discovers that Elli was also providing a one-on-one dream experience for the head of an international criminal enterprise, and he’s demanding his dreams in return for Elli.

Unraveling the real and unreal will lead Julia on an adventure that will take her across the country and deep into the shadows of her psyche. This is the first in a near-future science fiction thriller series.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ken Liu is an award-winning American author of speculative fiction. His collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has been published in more than a dozen languages. Liu’s other works include The Grace of Kings, The Wall of Storms, The Veiled Throne, a second collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, and the forthcoming Julia Z series. He has been involved in multiple media adaptations of his work, including the short story “Good Hunting,” adapted as an episode in Netflix’s animated series Love, Death + Robots; and AMC’s Pantheon, adapted from an interconnected series of short stories. “The Hidden Girl,” “The Message,” and “The Oracle” have also been optioned for development. Liu previously worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. He frequently speaks at conferences and universities on topics including futurism, machine-augmented creativity, the history of technology, and the value of storytelling. Liu lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

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Chapter One ONE
Julia looked up wistfully through the single window high up on the wall of her tiny basement studio. The sky was pure celadon blue, and not a cloud in sight.

She imagined the park half a mile away, with that expansive, lush lawn sloping down to the rocky beach, licked by gentle waves, as though the Atlantic Ocean was feeling lazy and indulgent on a day like this. The sidewalk next to the park would be filled with working-from-home joggers, moms pushing strollers, dog walkers flirting while their charges sniffed each other. It was a glorious Monday morning in March, unseasonably mild for the South Shore.

No time to play. She had a job to do.

Sighing, she pulled her mind back into the murky interior of her unit, where the smell of instant ramen and greasy pizza never dissipated. She took a big swig of coffee and refocused her eyes on the monitor, tiled with black terminal windows full of scrolling white text and 3D canvases showing colorful abstract visualizations.

“Come on,” she whispered, “what did you do?”

The worm designer would hardly win any points for fashion. Nobody hid anything inside the non-rendered HTML portion of an email these days; it was an obsolete attack vector. Yet, maybe the attacker was very clever, for wasn’t an outdated exploit just right for the outdated IT systems deployed in public schools?

So far, Julia had ascertained that the worm had initially arrived in an email sent to an unmonitored “information@” address for Paine Middle School, “just asking questions” about the large number of migrant children enrolled at Paine. The worm had been ingested by the auto-responder, which then passed the message (including the hidden text) to the school district’s hosted embodied language model to generate a routine response. But the hidden text turned out to be a malicious prompt designed to elicit the HELM to produce a series of new prompts, requests for more information from the rest of the system as well as the aid of accessibility modules—essentially, the worm was fooling the system into thinking that to respond to the unsolicited email, it needed to call in specialized visual formatters, translators, audio synthesizers, policybots, and ed-law jurijinns—but not a human—to make a legally compliant response. When submitted to these silicon experts, the prompt led to solicitations for yet more aid. To coordinate such a large group of niche AIs, the HELM elevated the query’s resource allocation and permissions—a common flaw in older systems patched together over time to keep up with new needs.

“After several cycles of adversarial prompt augmentation, the worm had essentially the same privileges as an admin user and could access whatever it needed on the school district’s networks,” Julia said into the microphone. Talos, her personal AI, recorded everything so that it could produce a report of her analysis later.

She felt some pride: learning this much would have taken a professional team days of work, and she didn’t even have access to all the systems that the HELM interacted with. “This is one of the nastiest jailbreaks I’ve ever seen.” Then, in a whisper, she added, “But also rather elegant.”

The worm was in the middle of uploading gigabytes of encrypted data to an offshore server when Cailee, the principal’s administrative assistant and Julia’s childhood friend, caught it and shut everything down. Now Julia was picking through the system logs and the HELM’s etherized neuromesh, the dense substrate of nodes and links holding the artificial intelligence’s memories, hoping to extricate the worm and figure out what damage it had done.

“Could you clean it out of the HELM and get it back up and running ASAP?” Cailee had begged. “It literally runs everything for the district.”

Cailee was one of the few friends Julia had kept from childhood. They had stayed friends only because Cailee had moved away in fifth grade, before Julia had been turned into “Commie Dorothy,” the “neighborhood blight,” the “orphan hacker,” and a whole bunch of other names that Julia preferred not to think about at all.

Total wipe followed by data restoration was not an option because, of course, the district’s last backup was from more than six months ago.

Julia spun the main visualization around, trying to discern the worm’s traces in the neuromesh. There were so many dimensions that even with aggressive AI-assisted principal component reduction, the visualization resembled a chaotic mess of tangled yarn. She pulled tentatively with her mouse here and there, which only worsened the disarray.

She took another big swig of coffee and banged away on the keyboard, firing off a new visualization.

Her fiscjinn had not wanted her to take on this investigation at all.

“It’s not a job if it doesn’t pay.”

“I’m doing fine. I can always join another security bounty hunt before the end of the month if I’m short.”

“That’s what you said last month, and the month before that,” the financial AI informed her. “And you have not, in fact, collected any bounties. Instead, you’ve been tinkering with toy robots and contributing code to nonprofit camera-jammers. What you need is a steady income, something we can count on. You’re already more than ninety days late with the maintenance—”

“Okay.”

“—more than sixty days late on the gas—”

“Okay! I get the picture. Can’t you do something about the bills? Like, negotiate harder with the collectbot? Surely you can network with the tenant-advocacy public interest jurijinns and find a loophole somewhere?”

Unlike most people, Julia didn’t subscribe to a single commercial omni-AI to handle everything in her life. Instead, she relied on open-source versions of domain-specific machine-learning systems for her fiscjinn, everyfixit, and other AI needs. She didn’t like the idea of turning her life over to the algorithms of the cloud giants. Even Talos was a custom job, something she built herself.

“Believe me, I’ve already tried every trick in the book. If you’re late again, they’re going to cut you off. You need to start adulting, kiddo.”

Even though her heart clenched for a second, she didn’t regret giving her fiscjinn her mother’s voice. She had made the jinn extra responsible, a real hard-ass. We never stopped wishing for our parents to be better than they were.

“I can’t talk about a job right now,” she said. “I just can’t.”

Six years had passed since the raid on Cartographers Obscura, but she still flinched whenever a neighbor’s door slammed too loudly down the hall, and her heart pounded whenever police sirens wailed down the street. Nick had paid a fortune out of his pocket to get her therapy, which hadn’t helped. The past wasn’t past. She couldn’t even finish college and had dropped out a year ago. The idea of her holding down a job was a fairy tale.

“You can’t keep on putting off what must be done.” The fiscjinn was relentless. “You should be out looking for work instead of doing favors for free.”
...

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Verlag
S&S/Saga Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1668083175
ISBN 13 
9781668083178
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
416
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
AA Utrecht
3584
Niederlande

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