DOUGLAS PRESTON has published forty books of both nonfiction and fiction, of which thirty one have been New York Times bestsellers, a half-dozen reaching the #1 position. He is the co-author, with Lincoln Child, of the Pendergast series of thrillers. He also writes nonfiction pieces for the New Yorker Magazine. He worked as an editor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University. He is president emeritus of the Authors Guild and serves on the Advisory Board of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe.

"NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is designing a probe which will be dropped into the Kraken Mare, one of the methane seas of Titan. There, it will embark on a journey of exploration. As the probe is being tested at Goddard, things go awry, and an explosion kills seven scientists. The AI program in the probe, a powerful, self-modifying AI called 'Dorothy, ' flees into the Internet"--Provided by publisher.