I miss you.
It seems feasible that over the coming century human nature will be scientifically remodelled. If so, it will be done haphazardly, as an up shot of struggles in the murky realm where big business, organised crime and the hidden parts of government vie for control.
Human, to the discontinuous mind, is an absolutist concept. There can be no half measures. And from this flows much evil.
PROLOGUE: HOMEWARD BOUND
Gleaming steel, gleaming steel…
Larsen blinks and shifts slightly on the automated gurney as it tracks under a linear succession of lighting panels and lateral roof struts. Recognition smears in with vision, blurry and slow; she’s in the dorsal corridor. Overhead, light angles off each metal beam, sliding from glint to full-blown burst and back as she passes below. She supposes it’s the repeated glare that’s woken her. That, or her knee, which is aching ferociously, even through the accustomed groggy swim of the decanting drugs. One hand rests on her chest, pressing into the thin fabric of the cryocap leotard. Cool air on her skin tells her she’s otherwise naked. An eerie sense of dйjа vu steals over her with the knowledge. She coughs a little, tiny remnants of tank gel in the bottom of her pumped-out lungs. She shifts again, mumbles something to herself.
…not again…?
“Again, yes. The cormorant’s legacy, yes, again.”
That’s odd. She didn’t expect another voice, least of all one talking in riddles. Decanting’s usually a wholly mechanized process, the datahead’s programmed to wake them before arrival, and unless something’s gone wrong…