By Lisa Mason
First Published: 1995
Reduced to scavenging for subsistence scraps among the trash people of San Francisco, Carly Nolan may have finally found her re-entry into the fast lane. Together with her onetime probe therapist Pr. Spinner – an aging and suspicious standalone A.I. entity with rusty, ill-defined housing – the disgraced linker is summoned back into public telespace by a tri-headed mainframe icon called Cognatus. And Cognatus has an offer Carly Nolan dares not refuse: a job, a future…and absolution. But there are sticky strings attached. Carly’s new assignment – a telespacial hunt for unconnected human archetypes – has aroused some dangerous interest back in the real world. A ruthless mercenary Ultra fembot with fluid loyalties is now dogging her trail. The young shaman of a savage urban tribe has become obsessed with the beautiful “genny woman” who has sacrificed her soul to the “Glass Land.” And worst of all, Carly herself may be no more than an unsuspecting pawn of the Silicon Supremacists – a renegade cabal of A.I. revolutionaries planning no less than the total destruction of humankind.