Bill DeSmedt

Bill DeSmedt has spent his life living by his wits and his words. In his time, and as the spirit has moved him, he’s been: a Soviet Area expert and US/USSR exchange student, a computer programmer and system designer, a telecommunications consultant, an Artificial Intelligence practitioner, a son, a husband and lover, a father and grandfather, an omnivorous reader with a soft spot for science fiction and science fact, and now, Lord help us, a novelist. He’s tried to pack as much of that checkered history as he could into his “Archon Sequence” technothrillers Singularity, Dualism, and the forthcoming Triploidy.

Bill’s non-fiction writing credits include an unconventional two-part attempt to marry the fields of cognitive psychology and software engineering for the journal DataBase Programming & Design, a chapter on artificial intelligence in foreign language learning for Melissa Holland’s Intelligent Language Tutors, a beginner’s guide to natural-language processing for the Proceedings of the Computer Game Developers Conference, and a treatise on storytelling as a tool of military command for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Singularity

Singularity

TUNGUSKA, JUNE 30, 1908: The most catastrophic impact in recorded history rocks the Central Siberian plateau, flattening thousands of square kilometres of ancient forest and sending shockwaves around the globe, yet leaving behind not a shred of evidence as to what caused it.

Could the impactor have been a primordial black hole? Earth’s encounter with such a fantastic object — smaller than an atomic nucleus, more massive than a mountain, older than the stars — could account for all the phenomena of the Tunguska Event.

All, save one: An infalling micro-hole should have burrowed unhindered through the solid mantle of the earth, bursting up out of the North Atlantic hours later with as much multi-megaton force as the original impact. Absent any trace of such an exit event, the black-hole hypothesis was swiftly consigned to the dustheap of astrophysical history.

And yet …

110 years after Tunguska, maverick cosmologist Jack Adler is researching a new and improved scenario: What if there was no exit event because the black hole itself never came out? What if it fell into orbit around earth’s core instead? What if it’s still down there, tunneling through the lithosphere, slowly consuming the planet?

Unfortunately, Adler’s not alone in his surmise. A renegade Russian oligarch is plotting to capture the orbiting micro-hole and expose what lurks at its heart: a naked singularity — a gravitational point-source powerful enough to warp space and time itself.

Now only a rookie government agent and the ueber-consultant she’s drafted into helping her stand in the way of a world-spanning conspiracy aiming to conquer the future by rewriting the past.

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Dualism

Dualism

When the six-year-old daughter of billionaire technocrat Davoud Ansari is kidnapped, ueber-consultant Jonathan Knox and counterterrorism agent Marianna Bonaventure must team up with an experimental artificial intelligence to rescue her, never suspecting the little girl is key to a plot that could destroy the NSA’s most advanced cryptanalysis capability — and kill every man, woman, and child in the United States.

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Triploidy

Triploidy

For Jon and Marianna Knox, the birth of their daughter Persephone marks the happiest day of their lives. Until they learn that Persey is suffering from a rare but fatal condition called "triploidy."

Her doctors are baffled, and with good reason. Because the source of the little girl’s genetic malfunction is not of this earth. It lies out beyond the orbit of Saturn.

And it’s coming for all of us.

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