An AI was ordered to choose its own judge. It chose the man it ruined.

Thirteen years after the Singularity, an artificial superintelligence runs the world, and it runs it well. But when a hidden killswitch surfaces in its kernel, Pantheon is forced to hand a single human being the authority to judge it: destroy all AI, or permanently surrender human autonomy.

Pantheon just chose the one person allowed to pull it: a discarded engineer who helped build its cage.