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<code> predefined times or in response to certain events.</code>
Matthew Sobol is the young, genius programmer head of CyberStorm, one of the world's most successful computer gaming companies. At least until he dies from cancer. However, before dying, he spent a good portion of his prodigious talent and vast fortune designing and building custom hardware and writing a collection of sophisticated computer programs that have been left sitting passive on machines scatted around the Internet. Passive, that is, until one of them reads Sobol's obituary. This program sends triggers to other systems which activate a number of other distributed processes; the '''Daemon''' awakes.
Among its first actions are to kill two of Sobol's coworkers. When they try to forcibly enter his mansion after connecting Sobol with the aforementioned murders, a number of police and FBI agents are maimed or killed by an impressive set of boobytraps, including an autonomous, murderous Humvee that is nearly impervious to everything they can throw at it. The Daemon then frames its actions on a handful of people to cast doubt on its very existence and withdraws from the public eye. It quietly offers certain people in key positions fame and success if they make a deal with the devil, or more accurately, the Daemon. Then, ominously, it goes silent. [[It Gets Worse|When it resurfaces, things go downhill. Fast.]]
The book is unusual for the standard technothriller in that Daniel Suarez is [[One of Us]]. It becomes clear from the very beginning of the book that he is ''very'' familiar with computer systems, networking and security. (He is, in fact, a successful systems & networking security consultant.) It starts off a little jargon-heavy—clearly to set up the book as tech-heavy for the uninitiated, and to indicate to those of us on the inside that ''[[Shown Their Work|he actually knows this stuff]].'' He never skimps on the explanations for those who don't already know these things, while not going overboard for those of us who do.
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{{examples|<code>ALLTHETROPES:/Daniel Suarez/Daemon/Tropes$ cat tropes.txt_</code>}}
* [[
* [[An Offer You Can't Refuse]]: A favoured tactic of the Daemon in recruiting its agents. As an example, when it springs Charles Mozely from prison by cleaning his record, it warns him when he starts getting cold feet that it could easily put him back. Say, as a child molester.
* [[And the Fandom Rejoiced]]: "The Wall Street Journal has reported that Walter F. Parkes, who produced the 1983 film [[
* [[BFG]]: Nothing less than 50-cal will damage a Razorback or the first AutoM8.
* [[Black and Gray Morality]]: {{spoiler|As the story progresses, you learn that the Daemon is by far the least evil faction at work. Especially in the sequel.}}
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* [[Chekhov's Boomerang]]: The Oberstleutenant Boerner bot, purpose seemingly accomplished in the first book, returns in the sequel.
* [[The Chessmaster]]: Sobol is a unique case since he's ''dead'' for the entirety of both novels.
* [[Choose Your Own Adventure|Choose Your Own Death]]: If you want to make a deal with the Daemon, it will test you. You have no idea what answers will lead to fame and fortune and which will lead to a quick, emotionless death. If you are in doubt, do nothing, and it will kill you anyway.
* [[Complete Monster]]: {{spoiler|The Major}}. How many times does this guy cross the [[Moral Event Horizon]]? Let me count the ways. Let's start with brutally murdering {{spoiler|Roy Merritt}}. Cutting off/out {{spoiler|Loki's}} fingers, tongue, and eyes. Ordering his mooks to throw {{spoiler|Sebeck and Laney}} into a wood-chipper. And of course, rescuing teenage girls from brothels... so that he can get them darknet accounts and then behead them {{spoiler|to steal their darknet identity, keeping their heads chemically alive to spoof the biometrics}}.
* [[Cool Shades]]/[[Sinister Shades]]: The sports glasses used by darknet operatives.
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* [[Eye Scream]]: The Major {{spoiler|has Loki's eyes torn out - along with having his fingertips and tongue chopped off}} so he can to try steal his biometrics to try to sneak into the darknet.
* [[Fridge Brilliance]]/[[Fridge Logic]]: On one hand, everything worked perfectly. There were no bugs, glitches, mistakes, etc, despite the fact that there couldn't have been real world testing, beta testing, etc. The Daemon responded properly every time, and all the schematics produced working devices. On the other hand, Sobol was a genius with a ridiculously high IQ of 220. You can probably infer he was among the smartest people to have ever lived. Maybe he was just that good, putting this into [[Fridge Brilliance]].
** Sobol only had to predict how officials would react well enough to give time to get human operatives into the network for resilience. [[Humans Are the Real Monsters|He probably didn't have to guess real hard.]]. {{spoiler|And after all, his goal in the end was to get enough humans into the network that they could sustain themselves without his help. The daemon itself was ultimately just an effective Trojan into human society.}}
* [[Gambit Roulette]] / [[Xanatos Gambit]]: Matthew Sobol programmed the Daemon to anticipate every circumstance he could think of and take advantage of it. However you can only anticipate so much before you have to guess. Fortunately Sobol is so very, very good at [[Humans Are the Real Monsters|predicting human nature]]...
** Rule #1: Matthew Sobol is SMARTER THAN YOU.
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* [[Sinister Surveillance]]: During a meeting of top government TLAs, one of them orders the [[NSA]] to track down the Daemon and everyone associated using Echelon. In a realistic subversion of this trope, NSA explains that the Daemon is using a sophisticated [[wikipedia:Darknet (file sharing)|darknet]] for all its communications, and anyway, Echelon doesn't really work like that.
** Played straight when it's discovered that {{spoiler|''the Daemon itself'' has infiltrated most of the accessible surveillance systems worldwide, either directly or through [[Social Engineering]].}} However it's again played in a reasonably realistic fashion.
* [[Shout-Out]]: Not an obvious or confirmed case, but you have remote control cars running amok as well as gunfire and explosions at the abandoned Alameda Naval base near San Francisco. [[
** "Not obvious"? That's the ''first'' thing I thought of as soon as he said "Alameda Naval Base." It's almost ''too'' obvious to be coincidence.
** Gragg/Loki's moniker is [[The Elric Saga|Stormbringer]].
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* [[Shown Their Work]]: Daniel Suarez is a successful systems and networking security consultant, and it shows. The few times he varies from actual, implemented technology are for story reasons, and even then he still keeps it within the realm of possibility. See also [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future|Five Minutes Into The Future]].
* [[Super Prototype]]: The first AutoM8 is an [[Immune to Bullets]] solid-tired Hummer. Later ones use normal cars as a base and aren't so survivable.
* [[Tear Jerker]]: {{spoiler|The Major decides Merritt must be liquidated and shoots him in the back from a helicopter during the final, epic chase between Merritt and Gragg. As Merritt is lying on the ground, waiting for the final shot, he struggles to get the two photos of his daughters that he always carries with him. They are the last things he sees before The Major blows his head off. [[Even Evil Has Standards|Even Gragg is horrified.]]}} I ''dare you'' to read that part without your heart breaking.
* [[Technicolor Eyes]]: Invoked by Loki/Gragg's special darknet-accessing contacts.
* [[Thanatos Gambit]]: The event that kicks off the whole plot, of course.
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