Daemon - Daniel Suarez

Matthew Sobol, programming genius, founder of CyberStorm Entertainment, one of the richest and most powerful of Silicon Valley's elite, is dead, but his final creation lives on to execute his last will and testament.At the moment of Sobol's death, computer programmes around the world burst into life, creating an entity known as the Daemon. The Daemon infiltrates our hyper-connected society, gathering secrets, stealing identities. Soon it has the power to change lives as well as the power to take them: those who serve the Daemon are rewarded; those who defy it are eliminated. Recruiting acolytes from the dispossessed and disaffected, the Daemon secures a growing stranglehold on the world's most precious commodity: information. And once you control information itself, how easy would it be to remake the world?It is up to an unlikely alliance - a computer illiterate detective and a white-hat hacker with secrets of his own - to challenge the monster that Sobol unleashed from beyond the grave. But before they can confront the Daemon they must discover what it wants...