The Case of the Invisible Face — Simon Hawke

My name is Hood, of R. Hood & Associates. That's what it says on the business cards. The R stands for Robin. Yeah, I know. I get it all the time. I've got four associates. Three of them are human. The fourth one isn't. That doesn't mean I value her any less than my human associates. And yes, she's female. Well, not technically. Technically, she's a machine, although you certainly wouldn't know it to look at her. Her name is Marian and she's an Io (pronounced Eye-oh), which is short for Inorganic.An Io, or Inorganic, is a humanoid self-aware AI, so advanced that they have limited citizenship rights. So advanced that they're supposed to be impossible to hack. Except someone managed to hack an AI-controlled facial recognition system and put Mick Moskowitz' face on a jewelry store robber and now Mick's been arrested, which doesn't sit well with his boss, Giovanni Johnny G. Gennero, head of the Gennero crime family and my newest client. Someone's also hacked the Color-Morph fashion corporation, another new client, turning their holographic street ad campaign into a grotesque nightmare. And my friend Allyn Adale, queen of the city's nightlife and granddaughter of the inventor of the self-aware AI, thinks it just might be someone she knew nearly 50 years ago, a young hacker known only as The Worm, whose heart she broke and who has spent almost fifty years plotting his revenge. This one's not going to be easy.