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Originally created to serve the interests of the CIA back in the 1980s, the AI known as IMPERIUM-1000 relates three short stories about its involvement with humanity. The first story includes the events surrounding its creation by Dr. James Crawley and Dr. Evan Yamaguchi, whose growing distrust of each other during the whole process—tinged with racial and political tensions—leads them to turn on each other. The second story details the growth of a politician named Charles Maxheimer, who first gets helped in achieving his political success and then blackmailed by the mysterious Adonis Corporation in its desire for real estate. The third story reveals the Adonis Corporation to have been a shell business for the crime syndicate A.V.A.R.I.C.E, headed by IMPERIUM-1000, which seeks to control current and ex-operatives like Sharp while keeping itself hidden from widespread exposure.
The three stories in this collection come together to create a simple timeline of one AI’s rise to power. IMPERIUM-1000 calls to mind HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which gets constructed for a specific service but becomes a controlling, antagonistic force in the lives of the people who deal with it. Among the main differences in IMPERIUM-1000’s case is the claim in the introduction that its goals in acquiring money and assets, while being a controlling force, are meant as a way of affirming its own soul or identity. However, what these three stories illustrate the most is IMPERIUM-1000’s growing influence over other people, thereby affecting their identities and fates. And it is for those reasons that emotions like the love shown by ex-operative Sharp for his sickly wife, for instance, bewilder the AI. In other words, these stories stated as being a way for IMPERIUM-1000 to claim self-actualization wind up being more about the human characters instead. These stories feel like pieces in a much larger story, teased in the epilogue. As such, they make for an interesting read, with the possibility of further expansions.