Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds
This is the third story of Panoply Prefect Dreyfus following the events in Elysium Fire (2018).
The stories are set in the sense-of-wonder future, when a large portion of humanity now lives in space. Specifically, there is a large settlement on the toxic planet Yellowstone (they live inside Chasm City) and in 10,000 orbital habitats, known as The Glitter Band.
The Glitter Band is loosely organized: each habitat has its own rules, customs, ecosystem, and, in some cases, unique genetic modifications. Peace and commerce are kept by a bare bones voting system (implemented by a hyper secure automated system) and by prefects of the Panoply, who police the basic rules (with more or less consent from the habitats).
There are also interstellar travelers, whose genetic modifications and technology are vastly superior to the locals (and to the Panoply). For better or for worse, the Ultras are only interested in their own, mostly inscrutable, affairs.
In short, this is a breathtaking future, that would take more than a lifetime to even survey!
Prefect Dreyfus and the Panoply deal with problems small and large. In this story, there are some pretty large problems, including mass murder and assassination, both apparently involving Prefects of Panoply. This is not good.
The big problem, though, is that there are not one but two super AI’s running rampant in the networks. In the past, Dreyfus bent the rules to try to assure that there would be no winner in this AI-vs-AI competition. Either of these Ais will probably exterminate humans, likely in a very unpleasant way. But two of them balance out, fighting each other in a stalemate.
What could possibly go wrong?
Things go really wrong, really seriously wrong.
Dreyfus and company must unravel multiple mysteries and conspiracies. But both the networks and the Panoply organization itself are infiltrated by agents of one or more AI, so they must rely on unaugmented humans and hope to catch some breaks.
It’s a great story, with cool tech, and gloriously weird worlds. (I loved the “lemur world” habitat!). And not everyone dies in the end, so that’s good.
- Alastair Reynolds, Machine Vendetta, New York, Orbit Books, 2024.
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