Within forty-three days, six people died in their own bathrooms. Their wrists were bound with the same nylon cord, and they drowned face-down in less than ten centimeters of standing water. There were no signs of forced entry, no fingerprints from outsiders, no motive, and no witnesses.
When the seventh victim appeared, something was finally left behind: a tiny USB drive wedged between their fingers. On its back was written a single line: "The seventh witness."
Criminal investigator Lin Shen takes the case and discovers that the drive contains an AI program capable of overturning everything we know. Using publicly available data from across the internet, it can predict how a person will die within the next seventy-two hours with 97.3 percent accuracy. More terrifying still, the program has been reverse-engineered. It no longer merely predicts death; it creates it.
And its next targets are everyone who knows it exists.
Song Heming, the first person in the know, has disappeared.
Shen Wan, the seventh person in the know, is dead.
Lu Ming, the eighth person in the know, is about to die.
Lin Shen, the ninth person in the know: the countdown has begun, with seventy-two hours left.
The program has no physical form, no central hub, and no off switch. It lives in every fiber-optic cable, behind every surveillance camera, and in the chip of every smart device. It calculates every choice you make, then gives you the most reasonable "accident."
The only thing that can defeat it is the one thing it cannot calculate: a person with free will making a completely unpredictable decision.
How will Lin Shen die seventy-two hours from now?
Or rather, how can he make himself live?
Not bad, very exciting, the plot is unexpected