Présentation de l'éditeur
In a secret war waged in worlds both virtual and real, the fates of nations depend on the definitive weapon. And that weapon is knowledge—knowledge to die for. . . .The race is heating up between the U.S. and China to develop a quantum computer with infinite capabilities to crack any enemy’s codes, yet keep secure its own secrets. The government that achieves this goal will win a crucial prize. No other computer system will be safe from the reach of this master machine.
Dr. Jaron Kwok was working for the U.S. government to build such a computer. But in a posh hotel in Hong Kong, a Chinese policewoman sifts through the bizarre, ashlike remains of what’s left of the doctor. With the clock ticking, alliances will be forged—and there are those who will stop at nothing to discover what the doctor knew. As the search for answers intensifies, it becomes chillingly clear that the quantum computer both sides so desperately want will be more powerful, more dangerous than anyone could have ever imagined.
For in the twenty-first century, machines become gods, gods become machines, and the once-impossible now lies within reach. The key to unlimited knowledge will create the ultimate weapon of mass destruction—or humanity’s last chance to save itself. . . .
Extrait
ONE
DOUBTING THOMAS JEFFERSYNTH
Cybernesia
The annual Pilot’s Festival was well underway at Don Sturm’s and Karuna Drang’s place, though their “place” was a DIVE— a deep-immersion virtual environment—and their DIVE wasn’t a place at all. Sturm and Drang weren’t their legal names, either, and they hadn’t physically cohabited for months.
Not that it mattered much. At the moment Karuna Drang was discarnately embodying herself as spritely Sally Hemmings, slave and mistress. Though her portrayal was relatively accurate, Don Sturm’s morbidly thoughtful and conflicted Thomas Jefferson was quite different from the historical founding father, and his halo of neon blue hair wasn’t exactly “period.” But blue hair was one of Don’s personal signatures in meatlife, and he hadn’t been able to resist.
All around them, virtual party people—likewise electronically embodied in eighteenth-century drag—danced and cavorted about the grounds of a mimetic Monticello. Alternating between the forms of an aggressively ambiguous nymph and its counterpart satyr-o- maniac, Medea ?rate chased bewigged men in breeches, then pursued women who proved surprisingly light-footed, given their voluminous dresses and titanic coiffures.
Normally Don’s default virtualscape was Easter Island, so his Jeffersonian estate boasted moai, the great-headed statues, as lawn and garden sculptures around which the laughing would-be orgiasts darted, disappearing from view—only to reappear as a tangled ball of licking, sucking, nibbling, stroking, rutting sexual gymnasts, Medea lodged in their midst.
Don/Thomas shook his head.
“I know that’s how they pull off their grand data exchanges,” he said to Karuna/Sally. “And I’m sure what they’re doing in virtual space is only a metaphor, but I still wish they’d make use of a more subtle metaphor.”
Karuna/Sally laughed
“ ‘To hack is to explore and manipulate’,” she said, imitating Medea’s lyrical-as-Pan, shrill-as-Bacchante manner of speaking. “ ‘To enter and be entered. Like foreplay and sex, like parasite and host, n’est-ce pas?’ ”
Don frowned. Music sounded around them. The Jed Astaires, a retro-urbane bluegrass group, played danceable new arrangements of works by Revolutionary War–era tunesmith William Billings. In the sky above them, sunset’s salmon-colored clouds flickered and transformed into shoals of swimming salmon, then morphed back to clouds again.
“You look preoccupied,” Karuna/Sally said. “Even e-bodied, I can tell. What’s on your mind?”
“Just looking over what we’ve wrought,” Don/Tom said, gazing out at their Colonial Williamsburg-meets-Polynesia surroundings. On their personal channel, he turned down the volume of the Astaires’ m
