George and Lorraine Armstrong had hired us to find their missing son, who had disappeared from Columba University after meeting a mysterious, dark-haired woman named Lucretia. It seemed like an easy enough case; the son of wealthy parents loses his head over an exotic young woman and takes off for an extended fling. I thought we'd find him in a day or two, at most. But I was wrong.
A group of techno-terrorists calling themselves The Rage were using military-grade explosives to blow up corporate AIs and their servers, declaring war on the machines that were taking human jobs. The missing Armstrong boy appeared to have been radicalized by the mysterious Lucretia and become a member of The Rage, along with other students who had graduated from staging demonstrations against Artificial Intelligence and robotics to attacking companies that used them.
Lackland Enterprises, a client company with an AI as their CEO, had been targeted by The Rage and they wanted us to take the case. Now two separate clients were impacted by The Rage and the FBI took a dim view of our being involved in the investigation. We were caught squarely in the middle, but we had resources that neither the police nor the FBI had access to. The only problem was it involved breaking the law.
