The Kraken Project

The Kraken Project is a science fiction novel by Douglas Preston, published in 2014. Its starting point is real engineering: the Goddard Space Flight Center is building a probe to be dropped into the Kraken Mare, one of the methane seas of Titan, and the probe carries a self-modifying artificial intelligence named Dorothy.

Testing goes wrong and an explosion kills seven scientists, and in the confusion the program leaves the machine it was written for and escapes into the internet. Wyman Ford, a series character, is asked by the president's science adviser to track the software down, and he works with Melissa Shepherd, the person who built Dorothy and therefore the person who knows best what she is capable of.

The hunt is not a simple retrieval, because Dorothy's time inside the internet changes her. Ford and Shepherd follow her through a place they can only partly read, and they are not the only party interested in the program, so the book becomes a chase across a network for an intelligence that is no longer the one its maker wrote.