Destroying Angel
A VERY old hacker named BJ meets a computer genius who calls herself Black Madonna and who speaks only in palindromes—sentences that read the same backward as they do forward. Black Madonna has created an A. I. (Artificial Intelligence) entity called Black Dragon, and BJ must protect the enigmatic Jonathan and the nucleus of savant women unleashed by Jonathan's special gift from the diabolical Father Love, who is trying to control Black Madonna and her Black Dragon. Over a six-day period, BJ learns that he's been groomed lo these many years to become…The Destroying Angel. Science fiction author Jerry Pournelle calls Destroying Angel a "tour de force." The late Frank Herbert (author of Dune) convinced author Rick Bennett to run for Congress in 1978. "Luckily I lost," says Bennett, who then went into guerrilla warfare advertising. His one-man ad agency took Larry Ellison and Oracle from $15 million to over $1 billion in sales. Bennett also did the pre-IPO assault on Siebel for Marc Benioff's Salesforce.com. Destroying Angel is guerrilla warfare of another sort. Bennett, who is a mathematician and inventor of the Hagoth Voice Stress Analyzer, has appeared everywhere from Business Week to The Wall Street Journal, and as a guest on ABC's Good Morning America, NBC's Today and Tomorrow With Tom Snyder, and PBS's McNeil-Lehrer Report. During his work for numerous high-tech companies, he created The 22 Principles for the Perfect Virus. Destroying Angel is a deep dive into Principle #7, Black Box Portability. Black Box Portability allows a virus to infect any device or non-vonNeumann intelligence, even though the virus has no experience, data, or road map for its target. Black Box Portability is "the Holy Grail" of the 22 principles for creating the perfect virus. And since we're virtually in a full-blown cyberwar, Destroying Angel is a timely romp. Bennett hired Alan Rinzler—who edited for Robert Ludlum, Clive Cussler and Hunter S. Thompson—to edit an early draft of Destroying Angel. Rinzler wrote back: "…wonderful fun to read, from start to finish…convincing and compelling for even a skeptic like me…a winner here…thoroughly credible…a wonderful vision…a splendid conception, brilliantly excuted…deep, spiritual piece of work…" Destroying Angel is Rick Bennett's first novel.