Why I Wrote Blood Code
When AI Meets Fatherhood
I found myself at a fascinating crossroads while writing Blood Code, the fourteenth book in my Mahu Investigations series. The intersection of cutting-edge technology and timeless human emotions—particularly the complex nature of fatherhood—became the heart of this story.
(My father and me when I was in college. I still have that suede vest and jacket of his.)
The original idea was “death of a tech bro,” to give Kimo a case that would allow me to think about some of the questions I’d been grappling with as a writer. Who owns our data? How can it be used to help rather than hurt people?
I didn’t want to address the problem of creative works like novels being fed into LLMs (large language models.) But a long walk with Brody and Griffin sparked a different idea. What if the dead man’s business focused on AI's potential applications in healthcare, particularly how it could bridge language and cultural barriers to provide better medical care for underserved communities.
I settled on Kahola.ai—an AI system designed to deliver medical information in Hawaiian, Korean, Tagalog and other Asian and Pacific languages. Kahola means “the life” in Hawaiian, and tacking the AI on the end gives the company a high-tech direction.
On the one hand, it’s hard to argue with a technology designed to help people. If used properly, it could save lives by making critical health information accessible to Pacific Rim communities in their native languages. (And by the way, this isn’t based on any company or technology. Just my imagination.)
But what if this company gobbled up lots of scientific research and didn’t pay for it? . Like any powerful tool, it raised thorny questions about data ownership, cultural appropriation, and the ethics of harvesting information without proper consent. There’s a conundrum that can be addressed in fiction—and perhaps even in murder!
At the same time, Kimo was facing his own evolution. I've always aged my characters in real time, and now his twins Addie and Owen are twelve—old enough to be full participants in the story rather than just cute background figures. They are beginning to question their identity and their complex family dynamics. They're old enough to handle difficult truths but still young enough to need protection and guidance.
The more I researched AI in healthcare, the more parallels I saw with modern parenthood. Both involve questions of identity, ownership, and responsibility. Who has the right to someone's genetic information? What happens when technology reveals truths that were meant to stay hidden? How do we balance innovation with privacy, progress with protection?
These questions became particularly poignant when I considered the boom in DNA testing and donor conception. Families built through sperm donation—like Kimo and Mike's—now face new vulnerabilities as genetic databases make it easier than ever to trace biological connections. The same technology that helps solve cold cases and reunite families can also shatter carefully constructed narratives about parenthood and identity.
In Blood Code, these themes collide when Noah Kim, the creator of Kahola.ai, discovers he has a genetic heart condition that could affect the biological children he fathered as a sperm donor years earlier. His well-intentioned efforts to warn these families sets off a chain of events that ultimately leads to his murder.
The result is a mystery that examines how artificial intelligence—for all its promise to heal and help—can also expose our deepest vulnerabilities and fears. It's a story about the many ways we become parents, the many forms that love takes, and the lengths we'll go to protect the families we've chosen to build.
In our age of advancing AI, these questions will only become more pressing. Blood Code is my attempt to explore them through the lens of crime fiction, where life-and-death stakes make philosophical questions urgently personal.
Blood Code is available in e-book and print for pre-order now from Amazon (delivering on June 2), and for e-book and print from other sites (I made a mistake when uploading and clicked the wrong button at the site that distributes my books to those e-retailers. Like I said in my last email, self-publishing is complicated!)
No comments:
Post a Comment