Book Review
Title: Randomize (Part 6 in the Forward Collection)
Author: Andy Weir
Genre: YA/Sci-Fi/Short Story
Rating: *****
Review: I haven’t read anything by Andy Weir before despite having both The Martian and Artemis on my bookshelf and requesting Hail Mary on NetGalley, but I am hoping I like his writing style in this short story. Randomize is the final story in the Forward Collection and centres around Vegas casino games being completely scam proof in the future and it may include a heist aspect to it as well. The protagonist is an IT genius who is enlisted to upgrade the security for the game of keno and its random number generator but not everything is as it seems.
We are introduced to Edwin Rutledge, the owner of the Babylon Casino as he reprimands Nick Chen for taking the keno game offline but when Nick explains why, Edwin sees the reason in why it had to be done. Together Nick and Edwin come up for a plan to stop their game from being hacked but unknown to them there is a plot to hack the casino and win a lot of money engineered by the wife of the man that delivered and installed their new computer system.
We see the couple have honest intentions behind the heist as they are trying to have a family and need to move for a bigger home that they just couldn’t afford otherwise. However, the plot is found out when the wife wins and is taking to Edwin’s office where he explains how they caught her and that she is going to go to prison despite all her intelligence she forgot some of the most basic rule of crime, not leaving any evidence behind like fingerprints and DNA. In a last ditch effort to benefit herself and not go to jail the wife makes a deal with Edwin to manufacture software for casinos that when activated would give them control of the whole casino industry for around a week, meaning Edwin would take millions in that time that wouldn’t be going to other casinos and he agrees. The morale of the story is how quickly greed can corrupt people but I really enjoyed it and I think next to Emergency Skin, this might be my favourite story in the whole collection.
Buy it here:
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Also see: Ark by Veronica Roth
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