For DCI Eleanor Blackwell, a punishment for being too sharp has landed her on the Gnome Squad, investigating the absurd serial theft of garden ornaments. But a call from the university's gleaming Advanced Computing Laboratory pulls her from bureaucratic exile into a world of chillingly clean logic and a death that is anything but simple.

Professor Ken Takeda, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, is dead. The scene is a textbook suicide, too perfect to be true. The only clue is a cryptic message left glowing on his monitor in binary code, a single line of eerie, elegant poetry: