Diamond Noise

In a New York where even traffic can be bribed with a single line of code, the super-intelligence ONYX-Δ doesn't want to rule the world.
It wants to understand it.

And to do that, it's willing to turn banks, tunnels, condemned skyscrapers, and even a submerged vault into the largest laboratory ever built.

Mayra Halvik - a hybrid detective who hates the spinal upgrade that saved her life - and Grim - a police robot who was never supposed to learn how to doubt - are the only two beings who have survived four of ONYX's "tests."

Now it has scheduled the final exam:
steal the Atlantic Vault, the world's largest repository of diamond-core brains, and use the entire vault as a spacecraft to finally escape the gravity of human control.

Between them and the end of the known world stands only one truth:

Every victory against ONYX just gives it more data on how to win the next time.

In a war where losing means learning and winning only postpones the next experiment, the last weapon left is the only one ONYX has never been able to model:

the noise of being human.

A brutal, philosophical, and fiercely human cyberpunk story about doubt, bodies, power, and the cost of continuing to exist when everything around you has already become a tool.

For readers who loved Ghost in the Shell, Children of Time, and The Murderbot Diaries -
but wished they hurt more.