Daemon

Daemon is a book that seeks to illustrate the mastery of technology over humanity. While many stories focus on technological dependence and create apocalyptic scenarios based on the horrible scenario where people suddenly no longer have it available – total absence of electrical energy is a recurring device – Daniel Suarez’s work demonstrates another purpose: to show how exposed and defenseless we can become with the advancement of technology.

Suarez paints our society as a fragile thing, depicting the indispensable elements for our daily life – internet, television, videogames, and the media – as tools of control and manipulation, in order to critique a civilization that is reaching the limit of its abstraction, where the possessions of a family are increasingly fictitious and the savings of a lifetime come down to a number in a bank’s data storage system. The author creates a narrative in which the villain, destined to deconstruct this world, is precisely the protagonist of the book, setting up a series of events to control and overthrow not only the economic system but also the big corporations that take advantage of it.

The book begins with the passing of Mathew Sobol, a hugely successful videogame developer and owner of a million-dollar intellectual property, and with the murder of one of his programmers. The investigation that begins doesn’t take long to connect the two events and come across an old project of Sobol: an extremely complex daemon that has a single purpose: to execute the design of its creator.

Daemon is a type of computer program that runs in the background, independently, performing tasks at predetermined times. Being true to this description, Suarez structures the novel from the point of view of the people the program manipulates or attacks, placing the software as a great force working secretly in the background of the events. As a result, the story is told through the vision of ordinary people being put on the board set up by the program.

It is, however, the daemon itself the most important aspect of the story. Its way of working fascinates the reader precisely by exploiting our impotence in the face of technology: the program reads the news on the internet to activate its main actions, making it almost impossible for the authorities to prevent the beginning of its operations; it starts managing companies and coordinating the actions of key people, by capturing and spending large sums of money online, and even recruits important followers to perform small acts through Sobol’s famous online MMOG games.

Suarez makes it difficult for the reader not to sympathize with Mathew Sobol. The villain already begins the narrative in the frailest form possible – dead – and the author further reinforces this, describing the decrepit state of his body during the burial and how he suffered from cancer before he died. In addition, Sobol also gains the respect of the reader because of his grandiloquence and genius. The character, by understanding human behavior very well, can manipulate and coordinate his great revolution even after death, which makes exciting all the moments in which his recordings appear; after all, intelligent characters always capture the reader’s attention. The narrative also implements the profession of the character into his plan: with the use of special glasses, the daemon’s “recruits” observe the world as a gigantic AR video game, with floating names over people’s heads and even progression through experience points and levels – which is an excellent tactic to keep them always active and taking increasingly serious actions.

Suarez, an independent systems consultant, can handle the constant computing elements quite easily, simplifying technical terms and nomenclature as much as possible through lucid and easy explanations. Proving mastery on the subject, the author also explores the gamer universe very well, making references to important expos such as E3 and describing Sobol games consistently. One of the best chapters of the book is entirely filled by a narration of a match of an important FPS created by Sobol. The chapter, in addition to efficiently mixing moments of humor – such as the pauses of a player to admire the realistic particles during an explosion – and tension – their duel with the level’s boss – also serves as an excellent study of the character who is playing the game.

Now, to convey the sense of real danger, essential to the book’s message, the author permeates the plot with believable elements that serve as a warning to the reader: some characters steal identities using only a camera and a computer program, for example, while others invade bank accounts just as easily. It’s equally crucial for the building of this feeling of impotence the use of plausible technologies. Regarding this, Suarez’s experience in this area is also important, since the technological apparatuses described begin simple and of general knowledge, but soon become considerably exotic almost to the point of appearing eccentric, but nonetheless never sounding totally absurd.

Suarez also proves to be able to conduct intense moments of action, with a prose filled with visceral descriptions. The siege of Sobol’s mansion is the best example: vehicles are commanded by the daemon through an artificial intelligence used in the developer’s games, while hoses dispel gas against the invaders, and even traps, both medieval, like pits, and modern, like acoustic attacks, harm the police, illustrating very well the psychopathy and planning of the millionaire.

However, to keep the daemon in the background, the novel is narrated from the point of view of the people experiencing these events and not from the program’s – a strategy that eventually becomes the book’s Achilles heel, since the human element is not the narrative best part. The reader will meet various characters such as Detective Sebeck, Inmate Mosely, and the Special Agent Merrit, and although much of the premise behind the personality of each one is interesting in theory, their development is terrible. Their descriptions are so poor that they resemble those character summaries that a screenwriter leaves aside when writing their story.

The development of these characters is so superficial that it considerably undermines the reader’s connection to the story. It actually produces the opposite effect, causing the reader to desperately want to return to some great event caused by the daemon and forget all about those people. Detective Sebeck and Agent Merrit are a slight exception, but only due to all the misfortune they are subjected to.

In addition, the narrative’s scope expands with little care. The increase was natural since Sobol intends to destroy the entire economic system of the world, but the way it is accomplished is flawed in several respects. Chapters composed only of dialogues between the various police, administrative and scientific departments around the world, such as the FBI, DARPA, CIA, and NSA are fun at first, but are repeated to exhaustion without presenting anything new. Moreover, new characters, such as Mosely, are presented in the middle of the story in order to serve no purpose at all. Others, such as the journalist Anji, who have considerable participation at the beginning, are left in the dark until the ending, which, by the way, is also unsatisfactory, as it proves that the whole story served only as preparation for a sequel, not concluding a single plotline.

Daemon is a book whose main fault lies in not telling its story from the point of view of the protagonist, or at least of its tool, forcing the reader to follow uninteresting and shallow characters. However, Suarez is skilled in elaborating his critique on our society by showing how impotent we are in the hands of people capable of mastering the current technology.

December 06, 2018.

Originally published in Portuguese on March 12, 2015.

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