But now as Dev is about to roll out a major new expansion to Omnitopia, there are people preparing to play a different game-one that is meant to strike at the heart of Omnitopia and bring the entire system crashing down.

    The catastrophe is confined to Bellona, and most of the inhabitants have fled. But others are drawn to the devastated city, among them the Kid, a white/American Indian man who can't remember his own name. The Kid is emblematic of those who live in the new Bellona, who are the young, the poor, the mad, the violent, the outcast--the marginalized.

    In love with a beautiful woman, Rush journeys far and learns much. Taken into the society of Dr. Boots's List, attached to the old mysteries, Rush grows closer to a sainthood he could never have imagined.

    In the near future, when medical nanotechnology has made it possible to map a model of the living human brain, radical psychologist Natalie Armstrong sees her work suddenly become crucial to a cutting-edge military project for creating comprehensive mind-control. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Jude Westhorpe, FBI specialist, is tracking a cold war defector long involved in everything from gene sequencing to mind-mapping. But his investigation has begun to affect matters of national security-throwing Jude and Natalie together as partners in trouble-deep trouble from every direction. This fascinating novel explores the nature of humanity in the near future, when the power and potential of developing technologies demand that we adapt ourselves to their existence-whatever the price.

    Librarian Note: An alternative cover for this ISBN can be found here Dom Salabos had a lot of advantages.As heir to a huge fortune he had an excellent robot servant (with Man-Friday subcircuitry), a planet (the First Syrian Bank) as a godfather, a security chief who even ran checks on himself, and on Dom's home world even death was not always fatal.Why then, in an age when prediction was a science, was his future in doubt?