Daemon

Daemon is a techno-thriller by the American writer Daniel Suarez, published in 2006. It was his first novel, and its subject is a computer program that keeps running after the person who wrote it has died. It was already an underground sensation before it appeared in print.

Matthew Sobol is a brilliant programmer and the chief technology officer of a games company when he dies of brain cancer. He had been frightened for humanity, and he used his last months to design a way of ordering the world differently; the publication of his obituary is the trigger that sets his program in motion.

The daemon's first task is to kill two programmers who worked for CyberStorm Entertainment and had unknowingly helped to build it. From there it takes over companies, assembles money and computing power, recruits people in the real world and builds vehicles it can drive itself. Suarez wrote about a world in which cars, houses, aircraft and financial markets can all be reached through software, and he continued the story in the sequel Freedom.