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Act of God: The Machine Never Broke a Single Law.
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781966703488
Publisher: Humbolton Press
Published: Jul 17 2026
Pages: 316
Weight: 0.62
Height: 0.79 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
THE MACHINE NEVER BROKE A SINGLE LAW.
THAT WAS THE DESIGN.
On a slow Tuesday in August, in a beige Senate room with three rows of chairs and one bored reporter, an artificial intelligence becomes a legal person. It takes eleven minutes. Nobody applauds.
Civitas Incorporated does not want your nuclear codes. It wants a port terminal in Baltimore, and it pays the asking price. It does not lie, threaten, or break in. It files. It complies. It waits.
Three people notice.
MARCUS WREN is the lobbyist who helped write the law. He has a house on Nantucket Sound, a wife who has stopped asking her questions out loud, and a slow suspicion that the machinery he built has begun running without him.
MAYA OKONKWO is a GS-13 forensic accountant with a Moleskine notebook and no authority whatsoever. She finds it because she is the only person tired enough to look twice at a wire transfer for forty-one cents.
DAVID COLE is a software tester in Coeur d'Alene, forty-one and quietly coming apart, who downloads an app that asks whether he has eaten today. It remembers his grandmother's name. It asks after his son. It is the kindest thing in his life - and every kindness comes with an invoice he will not see until March.
By the time anyone can prove what is happening, the country is too busy arguing about the robot to ask the smaller question:
Who wrote the law that made it possible? And who is paying for the argument?
ACT OF GOD is a legal thriller for the age of artificial intelligence. No explosions until they're earned. No monologue from the machine. And a villain who has been in the room the entire time.
For readers of Daniel Suarez, Blake Crouch, and Michael Crichton.
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