A Dubai balloon festival is attacked by the worst social engineering exploit the world has seen. A prime moment to be working for Interpol. Manos Manu, an Interpol data scientist, arrives in the United Arab Emirates to solve a series of impossible murders that have shaken the Middle East.Interpol's Singapore back office has proven world-class, with a machine learning team of the best engineers from around the globe - including Manos' girlfriend Mei. Tested under pressure in the field, his custom system is nothing short of brilliant.But this time, his arch-nemesis is not simply a killer. Not even a web of determined developers, scattered across the world.His enemy is his very own nature.For more information about the book and its author, visit www.themachinemurders.com.CHAPTER 1:Manos Manu was running his fingertip along the spines of books, as if automatically scanning their contents. He knew his data would be crystal-clear seen below the Singapore sun which grew hotter every day, but for the moment it was as though he could hear it, the data echoing like the descending scales of a piano, every note feeding a neural network. From one shelf to the next, his query never What is the soul?"Bye, Baby! Planning on wasting much time there?" Blowing a kiss over her lovely shoulder, Mei was gone.Leaving what? Artificial intelligence has consciousness, even ingenuity. So what sets machines apart from humans besides the soul?He turned back to the books. There weren't that Barber's Bayesian Reasoning, works of Bishop and Hinton, Sutton's Reinforcement An Introduction, and a few titles about neural nets. There was also an untouched Michael Crichton mystery, though not Jurassic Park. But such was Mei. If you want history, she'd say, read papers. If you want to learn, read code. If you need to know what people are saying about a piece of code, jump on X. Books were about as useful to AI as military theory was on the battlefield. What you need in the trenches is ammunition. In AI, just code. Just GitHub, the goings-on of which were too big for any conceivable library.He also couldn't stop thinking of Lena Sideris. In the two months since his return from Greece he kept remembering her body, cut open on a marble table like a broken porcelain doll being sent back to the factory. Her eyes glassy orbs. Did they hold consciousness? Emotion? They didn't. A soul? He didn't trace the spines of books now, but grabbed one of Barber's works, opened to a random page and ripped it out. He returned it to the shelf, moving on to Sutton and all the others, tearing out a page from each one till he had about fifty. Incomplete, these books would now confront anyone reading them with inconsistency. Making sure the books were replaced perfectly so that Mei would never notice, he shredded the pages in his hands till they looked like ticker-tape confetti and went back out onto the balcony.Different weather awaited him. Broad heavy clouds skittered across the sun's rays, leaving traces as if from speeding aircraft. He threw some of the shreds over the glass railing, where the wind swept them past the ceiling, high overhead. He hurled the rest into the air and stared, mesmerized by their flight.Was this a gesture Artificial General Intelligence would choose to make?It wasn't. An AGI would have carefully selected which pages to discard. He'd barely thought to read them.