Autonomous

It's an exploration of big pharma, corporate rule, love, ownership of people, robots and even ideas.

Jack Chen is a pharmaceutical pirate that reverse engineers drugs to make them available to people in need. She does this by selling hacked in demand pills to fund her more altruistic efforts. Imagine selling off market Viagra to fund malaria relief efforts.

Now imagine Pfizer sending out armed goons with a license to kill to “protect” their intellectual property. In this case it's a military grade robot and his/her human handler that burn a bloody swath across the globe looking for Jack.

The pill in question is Zacuity. It's marketed as a productivity enhancer but in some cases leads to death as work becomes as addictive as heroin compelling users to do nothing else at the expense of food, sleep and drink. There's a horrifyingly funny throwaway when a thinly veiled version of a Tim Hortons worker (this is set in Canada after all) is so compelled to make donut holes that he begins feeding it other things including a stray cat, other customers and his own leg as he screams “We're just making donuts!... Timmo's bots make the best donuts!”

Despite all the future world-building going on here it moves at a brisk, race against the clock pace.