<< The Plot

In 2029, Swedish physicist Sven Anderberg and American medical doctor Neil St. John published a scientific paper that would change the world forever. After ten years of research, they had succeeded in a feat of biomedical engineering no one had thought possible. They had managed to make machines so small that they were capable of being injected into the human body. These nanobots had the capacity to read and record every process of the human body - every muscle movement, every nerve synapse, every memory, every feeling. And with that technology came the possibility of replicating one's consciousness digitally, of uploading one's entire persona onto a database that became known simply as "the Net."

At first, the only people who actually performed that upload were paid experimental subjects. But as the number of successes increased, so did public interest. Celebrities and other millionaires were the first to line up. Then came the discovery of new raw materials, cheap enough that ordinary citizens could afford the process. Many did. Who wouldn't want the ability to travel anywhere in the world instantaneously, anytime they wanted, the ability to conjure physical location from cyberspace, to adapt any physical form desired? It was, at first, a fad, which quickly became a way of life. People began to be employed on the Net, go to school on the Net, even fall in love on the Net. They still inhabited their physical forms, but they spent the majority of their lives in their uploaded form. Reproduction occurred the old-fashioned way, but many children were uploaded as soon as they were born, allowed to learn, grow, and mature on the Net as their physical bodies were cared for by paid "Keepers".

Then came the great war, the third world conflict the people of the earth had dreaded for so long. With the threat of nuclear warfare, the superpowers offered the "option" of permanent upload, free of charge, to all of their citizens. Trade physical existence, or what was left of it, for permanent security. Live forever. There were a handful of people who resisted, but the majority of earth's population gave up their bodies forever, allowed their physical forms to starve or be euthanized, uploading for good.

The threatened nuclear holocaust never happened. With the majority of the world's leaders uploaded, there was less room for misunderstanding, and even fewer people left to fight physically. What was good for the Net, it seemed, was good for everyone. World peace, so long a dream, existed at last. The militaries retained a few physical soldiers, known as sentinels, who remained in their physical bodies, left to track down those who refused the upload originally. The Sentinels were uploaded, but retained their bodies, their contact with the Net maintained through implants, with which they had the ability to access satellites and other advanced imaging technology to aid in their pursuit of the resistance.

The resistance has been losing people at an alarming rate, and can hardly find places to hide anymore. But now, when it seems that the world is about to complete its massive step into the world of cyberspace, something has changed.

Two members of the Net, two people, having abandoned their bodies as everyone else did, have produced a child consciousness - Eden, the first person in this new world to be born having never inhabited a human body. Eden is pure energy. She knows everything her parents knew, and learns more every day. She is young, but she is not a child by anyone's standards. She has managed to enter classified files, those ordinary citizens have no access to. She knows of the resistance. And the girl who never walked the earth now wants to know what's out there.

She has tried, and succeeded, in communicating with those on the outside of the Net. So far, she has only appeared in dreams to Keenan Nynhoryn (known to the Net as Suspect 9), the leader of the resistance and the one person who, perhaps, can help her unlock the identity she was meant to have. Together, with Keenan's physical ability to go places, to do things in a world not projected for him by the servers of the Net, and Eden's ability to calculate, to predict, to identify, perhaps, just perhaps, they can find a way to resolve the turmoil, to forge a peace between those who have uploaded and those who have not.

But even on the Net, there is controversy over Eden's existence. There are those who say that her parents somehow maintained their physical forms, that she's only an ordinary person and not unique at all. Still others think she is a sign of the Net gaining its own consciousness, and are terrified of what that might imply. Time may be running out...