"Rollback" by Michael C. Grumley

Above: "Rollback' - Michael C, Grumley - 337 pages. I completed reading this book today. 15 November 2025.

With the advent of AI, no longer are technologies such Chronos inconceivable. As such technologies are actualized... as, more and more, man displays attributes heretofore associated with God, how does this new man-as-God paradigm impact our understanding of God? My head is spinning.

God knows when every sparrow falls.
Marcus Garvey

Reclusive billionaire, Italian tech-bro David Bruni believes his teenage daughter, Sofia, was abducted while on a trip to Antigua with two girlfriends four years previously.

Mike Mansfield, mid-fifties, a chaotically good guy with an unshakable sense of right and wrong, hunts down child predators, recues the child (sometimes), and delivers the perp(s) to the parents who hired him/them.

David Bruni learns about Mansfield and is impressed with his successes. Bruni unmasks Mansfield's edge: a hidden tech implant from his cop days, jury-rigged to interface with global cams giving him near-psychic tracking abilities. Bruni, intrigued and opportunistic, sees in Mansfield a perfect beta tester for his own advanced system, Chronos, developed by Bruni specifically to help in finding his missing daughter.

Chronos: an advanced AI-powered imaging software/system. Chronos analyzes vast archives of historical satellite imagery, surveillance footage, drone photos, smart phone images and other visual data sources. Using machine learning and pattern recognition, Chronos "stitches" fragmented, low-resolution, or partial images taken at different times and angles into coherent, high-resolution composites - effectively reconstructing past scenes or events that were never captured in a single photograph.

Bruni engages Mansfield to find out the truth about his daughter... AND provides Mansfield with access to Chronos to facilitate the search for Sofia.

Mansfield uses a group of friends, mostly seniors, as helpers in his pursuit of trafficking perps. Seniors are invisible, Mansfield says. No one pays any attention to them. Seniors are at once highly qualified and the least suspected in a milieu of high intensity intrigue. I thought Grumley's descriptions of seniors in the novel was quite insightful, even if peripheral to the plot and the book meaning.

So, in "Rollback," cutting edge AI technology blends with the sordid underbelly of human trafficking.

With access to Chronos enabled by Bruni's people in California, Mansfield travels to Antigua to start his search for Sofia. Mansfield teams up with Leslie Salazar, a sharp, idealistic INTERPOL agent in her early thirties. Notwithstanding that four years have passed since Sofia's disappearance, the case has not been closed, and Salazar is the only law enforcement official in Antigua familiar with the case. Salazar, as a Mansfield teammate, offers the advantage of being multi-lingual and she is highly ethical. Salazar comes to appreciate Chronos's potential as a weapon aimed at dismantling an international child trafficking syndicate.

The fast-paced plot leads Mansfield, Mansfield's "invisible seniors," and Salazar into crowded bazaars and sleazy bars with hidden rooms. Somebody is watching them move closer to solving Sofia's disappearance. Assassination attempts ensue. Chronos image stitching technology is pretty good for analyzing the past... say, over a month ago. But its effectiveness to analyze recent activity is limited. This technical problem is resolved for limited areas so as to bring Mansfield and Salazar closer to identifying and locating the perpetrators.

Sofia is ultimately found, seriously mentally damaged, in a remote house in Santo Domingo. A mole in Bruni's world tries to disrupt the rescue.

The real message of the novel for me is not the fast-paced plot line or the impact that such technology might have in crime fighting. Rather, the reader is forced to reckon with the implications of AI facilitated technology that can recreate on a global scale a real-life image of the past.

My first reaction on completing the novel was that AI technology, as conceived by Grumley, inches closer to describing attributes which in earlier times would have been attributed only to God. Reading "Rollback" caused me to remember this quote which I placed at the beginning of this review:

God knows when every sparrow falls.
Marcus Garvey

In "Rollback," and Chronos, author Grumley describes a technology which only a few years ago would have been inconceivable... a capacity to view the world that could only be attributed to God. With the advent of AI, no longer are technologies such Chronos inconceivable. As such technologies are actualized... as, more and more, man displays attributes heretofore associated with God, how does this new man-as-God paradigm impact our traditional understanding of God? My head is spinning.

The book was recommended to me by my friend and periodic motorcycle riding companion, John Galt, who lives in Walla Walla, WA. I look forward to his next book recommendation.