In the twenty sixth century, lifetime is currency, to be traded or gambled. Everyone gets sixty years, but could live centuries, or die in days.
In the twenty sixth century, lifetime is a currency, to be traded, gambled and lost. Everyone gets sixty years from the state, but could live for centuries, or die in days.
In a London traumatised by a bombing campaign, the aim of which appears to be mere terror itself, a para-military police force, The Limitation Bureau uncovers a conspiracy, which stretches all the way from the Red planet to the infinitesimal quantum uncertainties of a god-like computer network.
That network, the Scape, a virtual world as complex as the real one, is pervasive. There are functions of the Scape looped in diamond thread circuits in the bellies of mountains, or huge relay stations laced into the mantle of Jovian moons. As the politics of planets is being played out, a larger, more deadly game is under way in the Scape. A new religion has emerged – one where the disciples end their lives while their minds are still within the Scape itself; their God, their heaven. These pieces of human essences are joining together within the huge quantum mind and leading it towards sentience. It could be the dawn of a new age or the end of all humanity.