BrainSpace

Earth in 2090 is either a utopia or a dystopia depending on who you are. For the Normals, life is free necessities plus more idle time than is healthy, but for a HumaNet worker, life isn’t too bad. Not only do HumaNet workers get to work, they have personal kiosks for their needs. If you are a BioWire like Girard Destier, you are essentially at the top of the heap. Like most of the twelve billion people on earth, he takes refuge in the Virtual World, a place where you can be whomever you wish and visit vistas of places that no longer exist on Earth, like actual vacant land.

It is while Girard is orienting a new BioWire that he sifts through a load of digital garbage and discovers it isn’t really garbage. Inside the garbage are avatar parts for the Virtual World that are of an unsupported resolution and originate from outside of the realm. Girard doesn’t understand why bandwidth is being wasted for what could be created inside the Virtual World, but he has found a new amusement in a world full of too much information and drained of much of its color.

What Girard doesn’t know is that there are worse things to be than a Normal; a Data Savant is mind-wiped before being put to use as part of the Brain Array, but some Data Savants have become aware of what they now are and were. Those who have been cheated out of a meaningful life have discovered a way to cheat death, and they have no intention of being discovered; they will kill and destroy and even deal with a notorious AntiTech most everyone thinks dead if that is what it takes. As a war erupts both inside and outside the Virtual World, it falls to Girard to arbitrate the new reality…if he happens to survive...