Crucible: A Sigma Force Novel

It starts when the hero of my books, Commander Gray Pierce, arrives home on Christmas Eve to find his house ransacked, his pregnant lover missing, and his best friend’s two young daughters vanished into the night. The only witness to this brutal attack is his friend’s wife, Kat, who is found beaten, bleeding, and comatose on the kitchen floor. This attack—along with the fiery deaths of a group of female scientists in Portugal—exposes a horrifying danger, a threat that looms ahead of us in real life. Stephen Hawking once described this coming threat as the “worst event in the history of civilization.” Elon Musk fears it will lead to World War III. Even Russian president Vladimir Putin has said that whoever controls this event will control the world. That event is the creation of the first human-like artificial intelligence. As this momentous achievement draws near, a global hunt begins for a young student on the run with a technology capable of unleashing a demon like no other. To stop this from happening and save their loved ones, Sigma Force must solve a mystery tracing back to the Spanish Inquisition and confront the ultimate question facing humanity: What does it mean to have a soul?

Everyone knows about the famous Salem Witch Trials, where twenty people—fourteen of them women—were put to death for the practice of witchcraft. But these deaths were only the final spasm of mass hysteria that had already swept Europe. There, persecutions ran for nearly three centuries, and all told, over sixty thousand “witches” were burned, hung, or drowned.

All of this bloodshed and death can be attributed to the publication of a single book in 1487, a witch-hunter’s manual called the Malleus Maleficarum—or The Hammer of Witches. Written by a German Catholic priest and mass produced by the newly invented printing press, copies quickly spread across Europe and over to the Americas. It grew to become the instructive “bible” for prosecutors to identify, torture, and execute witches. Many scholars deem it one of the most blood- soaked books in history, even comparing it to Mein Kampf, as it led to over sixty thousand deaths, most of them women.

There is indeed. Her name was Saint Columba and a cult grew around her in northern Spain during the Middle Ages. According to legend, Columba was a witch from the ninth century, who met the spirit of Christ on the road. He told her she could not enter Heaven unless she converted to Christianity, so she did—but she remained a witch. She was eventually martyred and beheaded for her faith and became known as the “patron saint of witches.” To this day, she acts as a protector for witches, interceding on the behalf of good witches, while fighting against those who would corrupt such craft for evil purposes.

His name was Alonso de Salazar Frías. He earned the name “The Witches’ Advocate” due to his belief that most, if not all, accusations of witchcraft during the time of the Spanish Inquisition were mere delusions or false testimony drawn from torture. He saved countless lives with his defense of witches. In fact, I was surprised to learn that because of his persuasive arguments, the Spanish Inquisition was one of the first organizations in Europe to outlaw the burning of witches.

Back during the witch trials, many of the women accused of witchcraft were healers who used their local lore of plants and herbs to heal the sick. Or they were simply educated women who were curious and who dared to question the natural world. In other words, they were early scientists and naturalists—which was considered to be the sole domain of men. Yet, even today, women in the sciences find themselves enduring discrimination because of their gender: earning less pay, being passed over for promotions, being sexually harassed. Even their work is considered to be less important. Take for example, Dr. Donna Strickland from Canada, who won the Nobel Prize this year for physics. She was only the third woman in 117 years to be given this award. So, clearly in such a male-dominated field—in a forum considered to be enlightened and educated—women are still being persecuted for daring to question the world around them.

Well, I just moved into a new house that dates back to 1936. Now I’m not that superstitious, but after moving in, I had weird feelings at times: strange cold spots, odd sulfurous smells. I thought to myself, “Cool, this place is haunted.” So I asked the realtor: “Does this house have any history of being haunted?” Her answer, shocking enough: “Have you seen THE ghost?” I was like “No, tell me more.” I expected some grisly tale of death, of families fleeing in the night. Instead she says, “A prior owner had the home inspected by a Fengshui expert who judged the home to be indeed haunted–by the ghost of a raccoon.” Hmm, I thought “That sounds about right for a former veterinarian turned writer.” So to appease this ghost, I now leave my kitchen garbage can open all night. Ghosts gotta eat, too.

Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” You only have to pick up your iPhone to appreciate this statement. If you took your phone a few decades into the past, it would seem miraculous to people back then. Likewise, in my novel, I shine a light into what’s currently transpiring in computer labs around the world, some of it quite
astounding, especially when it comes to the research into artificial intelligence. We’re much farther along this path to a true human-like intelligence than most people realize.

A recent poll of computer experts revealed that 42% of them believe this creation will happen within the decade, with half of those claiming within five years. And a handful believe we’ve already reached that point. Take for example AlphaGO—Google’s DeepMind AI player. It beat the world’s champion at the Chinese game of Go, a game that is trillions upon trillions of times more complex than chess. No one expected any computer to beat a human at Go for at least another decade. Yet, it took the company only months to train AlphaGo to accomplish this. Then more recently, Google built this program’s big brother, AlphaGoZero. This new program taught itself this game, all on its own, and in only three days, became the world champion, beating even its original version in a hundred out of a hundred games. It did this by developing strategies that no human had come up with after thousands of years of play. And there are even stronger programs on the horizon. So be afraid, be very afraid.

It’s because the first human-like intelligence will not be idle. Instead, it will prove to be very busy. It will quickly—in weeks, days, maybe even hours—evolve into an incomprehensible superintelligence, a creation far superior to us, one that will likely have little use for humans. When that occurs, there is no way of predicting if this new superintelligence will be a benevolent god or a cold, destructive devil.

Yes. Buried in the heart of the novel is a curse—a curse not cast by any witch but from a danger inherent in the knowledge found within these pages. Once you read this book, you may inadvertently be dooming yourself for all eternity. So read at your own risk.

Not at all. I tailor each story so a new reader could jump into the series at any point. In fact, only a small fraction of my readership have read my series in order. So anyone interested in this unique set of heroes and the troubles they face, CRUCIBLE is a perfect place to jump on in.