Slant

In the sixth decade of the 21st century, the world has been transformed by two things. Nanotechnology has been perfected, giving humans the ability to change their environment and themselves down to the cellular level. And the study of the mind has brought a revolution in both human psychotherapy and artificial intelligence. It's a sane and perfect world. Almost. A man called Jack Giffey is planning to break into the Omphalos, the most secure building in all of separatist Green Idaho. Rumor says that the Omphalos houses the not-quite-dead - the very wealthy deceased who are still alive, their brains connected directly into Thinkers. Data is the great treasure of the new millennium, and Giffey plans to tap into the Omphalos dataflow, to steal the knowledge gathered by the inhabitants of the Omphalos. Public Defender Mary Choy, now living in Seattle, has been called in on the bizarre suicide (or murder) of a very wealthy, secretive man. His last recordings hint at some terrible guilty secret. Choy would very much like to know what such a man - rich and politically powerful - might have done that he could no longer live with. And in the offices of Mind Design, Inc., Jill, the most advanced artificial intelligence in the world, has had a unique experience. She has received a request for contact from a new AI, one she does not know and did not help to design. Jill has never met a stranger of her own kind before; is it an alien Thinker or the offspring of some vast conspiracy?