About the Book
Philip K. Dick Award: Best Novel nominee (2006).
It is the twenty-third century. Herb, a young entrepreneur, returns to
the isolated planet on which he has illegally been trying to build a
city – and finds it destroyed by a swarming nightmare of self-replicating
machinery. Worse, the all-seeing Environment Agency has been watching
him the entire time. His punishment? A nearly hopeless battle in the
farthest reaches of the universe against enemy machines twice as fast,
and twice as deadly, as his own – in the company of a disarmingly
confident AI who may not be exactly what he claims…
Little does
Herb know that this war of machines was set in motion nearly two
hundred years ago – by mankind itself. For it was then that a
not-quite-chance encounter brought a confused young girl and a nearly
omnipotent AI together in one fateful moment that may have changed the
course of humanity forever.
