by J D Lasica
Bo’s expression turned grim. “Oh, no.”
Bailey leaned forward, clasped her hands. “Pop, what is it?”
He paused as if deciding whether to be as transparent as his daughters now demanded. “Bad news.” He turned to Kaden and handed her the phone with the message. “I was afraid of this. Kaden, you’ve been indicted for felony murder in Dallas County.”
Bailey’s face radiated concern. “Murder?” She looked at Kaden and asked, “Who are you?”
It was a damn good question.
Characters
Amelia Earhart standing by her Lockheed Electra in Natal, Brazil, in June 1937. Her plane disappeared over the Pacific less than a month later.
Here are the characters in Catch and Kill who appear in at least two chapters:
Adam Bashir: Chief scientist at Samana Ventures
Alex Wyatt: Senior correspondent for the online news site Axom who’s posing as millionaire entrepreneur Andrew Bayless
Alice Wong: Editor-in-Chief of the online news site Axom
Amelia: The personalized artificial intelligence created by Kaden
Annika: Data operative/hacker and partner in Red Team Zero at B Collective in Brooklyn who also just began working for Bo on the side
Bailey Finnerty: One of the high school girls abducted during the Disappearance
Bo Finnerty: Off-book covert operative whose daughter Bailey was abducted
Carlos: Off-book field agent working for Bo
Charlie Adams: Reporter for the online news site Axom and Alex Wyatt’s best friend
Compact: A cabal of billionaires bent on divvying up the world. Members include Incognito, Armenian-born Zaven Kasparian, Radovan Broz of Croatia, Jaco Kruger of South Africa, Walid Abdullin of Uzbekistan, Luis Alcivar of Ecuador, and Zhang Lee of China.
Deirdre Blackburn: Kaden’s birth mother
Dražen Savić: Lucid’s security chief
Eileen Mills: Bo Finnerty’s ex-wife and Bailey’s mother
Evelyn Gladstone: One of the millionaire guests at Fantasy Live
Gabriel: Kaden’s boyfriend
Jacques Bouchard: French entrepreneur who’s smitten with Kaden in Zug
Judy Matthews: Piper’s mother and a translation specialist
Kaden: Data specialist/hacker with special skills training who prefers not to use a last name. Or pronouns, for that matter.
Katarina Gorka: Sixteen-year-old from Belarus being held captive at Immersion Bay
Ling: Bailey’s best friend who was abducted during the Disappearance
Lucid: Chief operating officer of Samana Ventures and Incognito’s right-hand man
Maurice Beauchamp: One of the millionaire guests at Fantasy Live
Maxim Volkov aka Chairman Incognito: Belarusian billionaire who purchased the island of Samana Cay and funded its mixed reality theme parks
Nico Johnson: Kaden’s soulmate, workmate and fellow graduate of the special ops training facility Lost Camp
Rachel Torres: Alex’s personal ambassador at Fantasy Live
Paul Redman: Publisher-owner of the online news site Axom and billionaire investor
Piper Matthews: One of the high school girls abducted during the Disappearance
Randolph Blackburn: Billionaire media and marketing mogul who is Kaden’s grandfather
Sayeed: Data operative/hacker and partner in Red Team Zero at B Collective in Brooklyn
Tosh: Off-book analyst working for Bo
Viper Matthews: Piper’s father and former Special Forces operator
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Fact vs. fiction
Catch and Kill is a high-tech thriller inspired by Michael Crichton, the king of the technothriller. Crichton, who died in 2008, once wrote that his books “are all about actual possibilities,” not far-off science fiction. In the same way, Biohack and Catch and Kill blend today’s reality with tomorrow’s coming-to-a-mall-near-you plausibility.
So what’s real and what’s not yet real?
Let’s start with the setting for much of the book. Samana Cay is a real place. Today it’s an uninhabited island in the Bahamas, though so far no underworld figure has ponied up five billion dollars to buy it outright. Many historians believe Samana Cay was the first place in the New World where Christopher Columbus made landfall.
Now, onto the technology. While general artificial intelligence remains years away, there have been credible reports that researchers have already developed a self-aware computer in secrecy. You’ll notice that many of Amelia’s abilities are more limited, confined to search engine queries, communication, surveillance, or data-crunching tasks. Imagine souping up Amazon Echo or Alexa by tricking it out with vastly more processing power, giving it access to a global database, enabling it to self-improve, and giving it a personality.
All manner of science fiction movies and novels depict AIs from the playing-hard-to-get Her to Arthur C. Clarke’s immortal HAL 9000. But I haven’t yet seen a personal AI brought to life as a historical figure. (Have you?) Isn’t it much more human to interact with an AI with a specific personality and distinctive appearance? I’m not sold on the idea that we’ll all have robot sidekicks when we can more easily don a pair of smartglasses and interact in a cheerful way with the AI of our choice.
Would a world-class programmer like Kaden be able to create and personalize a custom AI such as Amelia Earhart? To my mind, it’s not a question of if but of when.
How about Kaden’s smart contact lenses? They’re in development at a research lab near you. Already bionic contacts are here and not merely the stuff of sci-fi series. Prototypes of bionic contact lenses were first developed in 2011, with the first Wi-Fi enabled contact lens prototype developed at the University of Washington in 2016. Do they still have a long way to go to achieve what Kaden does in the book? Yes.
As for Lucid’s video-enabled eye, that creepy technology has already made its way into reality. Digital Trends magazine reported in 2017 about “biohacks that blur the line between human and machine,” including The Eyeborg Project, the brainchild of filmmaker Rob Spence. Spence wanted to deliver a point-of-view filming experience and thus created a prosthetic eye that captures video footage.
And CNET reported in November 2018: “Biohackers set on re-engineering better bodies are creating bionic eyes and sticking RFID chips under their skin to turn their limbs into credit cards and travel passes.” It is, indeed, all the rage in Scandinavia.
What about Fantasy Live’s real-time facial manipulation and simulations? It’s on the way. Nvidia and other companies are working on technologies where you can take a person’s face and manipulate it so you can’t tell if the video you’re watching is real or not.
What about cloning Alex’s voice? In 2017, a Canadian artificial intelligence startup called Lyrebird debuted, showing off a new technology that can create realistic artificial voices from only a minute of sample audio. Google, Adobe, and other companies have similar projects in the works and the tech is getting better all the time.
Staying on tech: In a key scene with the Compact in Zug, I refer to spatial augmented reality face-masking techniques. I’m indebted to German computer scientist Oliver Bimber, who heads the Institute of Computer Graphics at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, who writes, “Changing the appearance of static or moving objects or peop
le using projector-based AR technologies is possible within certain limits.” He explains the science of SAR in detail, and I’ll be happy to share his correspondence on the subject with readers.
Prof. James Chong at the University of York has been instrumental in helping me work out the logistics of how bad actors might use archaea, the oldest form of life on Earth. Advances in microbiology have ushered in an age when skilled technicians may be able to unleash personalized biological attacks based on people’s genetic makeup.
Can a genetically modified pathogen be time delayed and lay dormant until it’s externally triggered by the bad guys? “Theoretically, yes,” Chong tells me. “In the scenarios you outlined, once you have got your engineered archaea into the human gut, then these genes would not be expressed unless they were triggered. This could be easily done through a food additive or by exploiting the so-called ‘gut-brain axis,’ which suggests that there are signaling pathways between the brain and the gut and vice versa. So if you make someone very stressed, then this could trigger a response from the gut microbes.” Sorry about that, Eileen.
What about personalized targeting? Says Chong: “You could also target your archaea to only be activated by certain features of the host. There are certainly DNA markers that can apparently be used to determine differences in background – so Irish American compared to Italian American might be possible. And male vs. female is easy.”
What else? FN Herstal makes the SCAR 17S Special operations forces Combat Assault Rifle. I don’t know that a smart e-rifle is in the works, but proponents in the U.S. have been pushing for the adoption of smart guns that can detect authorized users. They’re not ready for prime time today but may be in a few years’ time.
If you have other questions about what’s true and what’s fiction in Catch and Kill, just drop me line.
– J.D. Lasica
Acknowledgments
As with Biohack, the first entry in the Shadow Operatives series, Catch and Kill relied on a host of people much smarter than me to guide me through the science and technology tackled in the book so that I’m gliding close to terra firma and not floating off into the ether of pure speculation.
For my continued forays into biotech, I’m especially indebted to Prof. James Chong at the University of York, whose paper on paper in Microbiology Society on archaea as closet pathogens led me down the evil and scary path toward biological pathogens and personalized germ warfare.
Augmented and virtual reality play large roles in the novel, and I owe another lunch to Nicole Lazzaro, Sky Schuyler, and Shel Israel for their insights about mixed reality. Oliver Bimber at the Johannes Kepler University Linz in Austria offered valuable assistance on spatial augmented reality. Emily Olman helped inform the scenes set in Zug Valley, Switzerland. And Robert Scoble was helpful in my sorting out SLAM mapping.
I owe an immense gratitude to my first reader, Mary Lasica. Others lending their expert eyes at whipping the manuscript into shape included authors John Hindmarsh and Michael James Gallagher, Isabel Draves, members of the Tri-Valley Writers including John Bluck and Gary Lea, launch team members Terry Temescu, Howard Greenstein, Clark Quinn, Shannon Clark, Judi Clark, and the excellent beta readers Jess Angers, E.G. Stone, Brooks Kohler, Dana Maclean, Deborah Duncalf, Kay Smith, Mark Ferguson, Tiffany Lee, Richard Pietschmann, and Tabatha Lemke.
I’m indebted to the Squaw Valley Community of Writers for starting me down the path of fiction writing. Authors too rarely acknowledge a debt owed to other authors, perhaps believing it’s a given. Still, I feel the need to tip my hat to masters old and new whom I’ve drawn from, including Michael Crichton, James Rollins, Blake Crouch, Robert Ludlum, Dan Brown, Dean Koontz, Margaret Atwood, Tom Wolfe, Stephen King, Matthew Mather, A.G. Riddle, Tim Tigner, Mark Dawson, Brett Battles, Steve Konkoly, Leslie Wolfe, J.B. Turner, Marcus Sakey, Diane Capri, Joanna Penn, Michael C. Grumley, Nora Roberts, Michael Connelly, Daniel Suarez, Barry Eisler, Nick Thacker, A.C. Fuller, John Hindmarsh, John Mefford, and other great storytellers. You should read them all.
Last, thank you to those who joined my Readers’ Circle for your continued support. And thanks to the readers who’ve found my novels, taken the time to read them, and posted reviews. If you spot something in these pages that I got wrong, let me know and I’ll fix it. Always feel free to drop me a line.
– J.D. Lasica
About the Author
On the writing front, J.D. Lasica is the author of the book Darknet (John Wiley and Sons) and Biohack, Book 1 of the Shadow Forces thriller series. Over the years he has been a newspaper journalist, books editor, magazine columnist, and a tech columnist for Engadget.
On the tech front, J.D. has been a tech entrepreneur and an executive or senior manager at several startups and has run a department at Microsoft. He has been a pioneer in social media and grassroots media as well as a longtime champion of the idea that we all have stories to tell. J.D. was one of the first 20,000 bloggers on the planet, and he co-founded Ourmedia, the world’s first free video hosting platform (yes, before YouTube).
J.D. has spoken at the United Nations, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, MIT, the Institute for the Future, and at dozens of conferences on four continents. Besides speaking to college students and aspiring authors, he continues to be involved in the social good sector. Most of all, he enjoys interacting with readers.
J.D. lives in Greater Silicon Valley with his wife and their hyperkinetic dog. He’s now working on Book 3 of the Shadow Forces thriller series.
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Copyright © 2019 by J.D. Lasica
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Catch and Kill is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All rights holders retain the rights to their trademarks and copyrights. Any references to historical figures, real people, or real places are used fictitiously.
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Cover design: Damonza