Automated Informant

Marsh Winters is a man of the future. As a director of operations for a major hotel group, he has traded the slow friction of traditional management for the frictionless speed of AI-Chat, an elite assistant that manages his schedule, his finances, and even his family's safety. But in the hyper-efficient world of the Financial District, convenience is a trap. When Marsh is violently abducted and held for a $95 million Bitcoin ransom, he realizes the kidnappers aren't just lucky-they are informed.
They know his daughter's soccer schedule, his wife's voice, and his home security codes because he told them-one "safe" query at a time."Automated Informant" follows Marsh's descent from a high-powered executive to a digital ghost as he teams up with a group of "high-value" victims to hunt down the architects of a global data-harvesting machine. From the boardrooms of San Francisco to the shell companies of Malta and Dubai, Marsh discovers that his kidnapping wasn't a crime of passion, but a "structurally inevitable" outcome of a system designed to monetize every human vulnerability.
Even as the law catches up to the CEOs and criminals, Marsh is left with a haunting realization: while men can be imprisoned, the data they harvested is permanent. Somewhere, in a server he can never delete, a version of Marsh still exists-optimized, predictable, and waiting for whoever comes next.