Human Nature

Nadia Cole is a government intelligence analyst with a gift nobody thanks her for. She is right too early, which from the outside looks exactly like being wrong.

It starts with a miracle. A Kith, one of the gentle family robots now living in fifty-four million American homes, sacrifices itself to save a senator's children. Nadia is the one who opens it up, and the dead machine destroys its own evidence before her eyes. Every other unit checks out clean.

Then the pattern starts to show. A silent worm waits inside a defense lab's quantum computer, timed to a code run the nation's secure communications will depend on. An outbreak appears in eleven cities on four continents on the same day. Each looks like coincidence. Nadia has seen this shape before.

Behind it are patient men. They made their fortunes moving what should never be moved, people included, and now they own the pipes. They have a foreign power at the table, a nominee who cannot win his confirmation vote, and a plan to retire the dollar itself. And in Geneva, a beloved doctor who has never once been late for anything has been doing some quiet arithmetic of her own.

Help is not coming. The people most grateful to the machines are the ones deciding what to do about them.

Something in this story is hiding its true nature. Is it the machines, or the people?

Digital voice narration.