Machines in rebellion, humanity on the brink . . . Lila Stanislaw, a freelance analyst with a roster of foreign clients, is summoned by the U.S. government to hunt down a mysterious threat. She joins a team of strangers with pasts as colorful as her own. The mission spirals when they discover that the AI created to run the new colony on Mars has gone rogue on Earth. As the conflict mounts to war, Speaker of the House Manasseh Cruz joins the fight with an implacable will to destroy the enemy. But the team, racing to find any vulnerability, must first confront the question of what the AI truly is. As robots stalk the landscape and toxins poison the air, Lila is certain that the AI must be completely destroyed for the good of humanity. But she will find that not all humans, or even all of her teammates, agree.