About · Foreword

Before the first page

The first sentence of The Cold Aisle is about another sentence.

Ines Calloway, a reporter on a New York newspaper called The Hudson Wire, spends nine days proving that a building contractor in Queens billed the city twice for the same steel. She has the invoices. She writes it plainly.

The steel was delivered once and paid for twice.

The newspaper has installed a program called Copyboy, which reads every story before a human editor does. Copyboy rewrites her sentence so that it no longer says what she proved:

In a development that raises questions about oversight, a contractor may have received duplicate payments.

She leaves the machine’s version on her screen for almost a minute. Then she changes it back.

That minute runs under the whole book: the gap between what a person knows and what a machine will let a person say.

A few weeks later, Julian Maddox is due to say something. He built Linnet, a companion program that forty million people talk to on their telephones. He has asked a small company of guests, Ines among them, to Tarrow Point on the shore of Lake Ontario in New York State, a coal-fired power station that closed in 2014 and has been turned into a data centre: a building of computers, kept cold by its own machinery. At eight o’clock on the morning of the eighth of January 2027 he will speak to the public.

In the night, snow off the lake closes every road. Before dawn he is found dead in a hall of his own computers. The last version of his speech sits in a satellite overhead, locked, and only one key opens it. Eight people come under suspicion. The building, which runs itself, has recorded everything it did that night, to the second.