Search Worlds Without End

IT'S A POST-ECOCAUST WORLD. WELCOME TO IT.

In the San Jose of tomorrow, all of nature is gengineered-from the warm-blooded plants to the designer people. But even in a rigidly controlled biosystem, with its pheromone-induced social order, the American dream is still the American dream. Caught between these new-old worlds, Rigo is on his way up-he's going to be part of tomorrow, even if it means he has to leave today behind.

Written off as a sellout on the streets of his old 'hood, Rigo's got his own ap in an aplex, a 9-to-5er, and a girl. He's got opportunity. If he works hard, his job with a heavyweight politicorp could give him a chance to move up in the clades. But when he's chosen as part of a team to construct a new colony on a nearby comet, Rigo smells a setup. And when disaster strikes, he learns that if there's a way to bend the rules, there's also a way to break them...

It's a post-everything world, so how could everything possibly go wrong?

When the ecotecture starts to degrade on the asteroid of Mymercia-killing a workgroup on the surface-Fola Hanani miraculously survives. A former missionary, she's hacked a living out of a gengineered ecology built after the Armageddon of overheating, overpopulation, over-everything. Now she has to find out what's causing a catastrophic biosystem failure before everyone else on Mymercia is killed.

Meanwhile, onworld, in a trailer park of migrant workers, a washed-out one-hit wonder named L. Mariachi plays the guitar for a community suffering from a contagious form of soul loss. It's a song that Fola's implanted IA--information agent--thinks she needs to hear. Because what is happening to these lost souls is spreading at quantum speed to everyone else. Something or someone is trying to reprogram the system with the ultimate virus.

And as virtuality becomes reality in this post-ecocaust world of plug-in sex components, old-world medicine women, and the cheesiest pop culture, humanity itself is about to crash....

In a world where image is everything, where the past is more real than the present, the rich can reprogram everythingand cast themselves in the starring roles. Everyone else is nothing but an extra....

As part of the supporting cast, Pelayo survives as a test subject for the latest electronic skin and philm technology, which brings past trends and famous people to vivid life on his body. His cousin Marta works at a cinematique offering cheap skincense, image grafts, and nanimatronics. Thats where she meets Nadice, an indentured worker smuggling illegal ware to escape an exclusive resort specializing in kitschy environs. But Nadice is hiding something far more contraband: a forbidden pregnancy she cant explain but is determined to protect. When Marta tries to help, both women disappear.

While Pelayo searches for his cousin, homicide detective Kasuo van Dijk investigates a mysterious death that may involve a new kind of e-skinmass-mediated ware that will lead him to Marta, Nadice, her employerand a diabolical plan to deliver humanity kicking and screaming into a frightening new age of information....

In such groundbreaking novels as Crache and Idolon, Mark Budz established his reputation as one of science fiction's most exciting and innovative writers. Now he surprises us again with an ambitious new thriller set in three realities at once, where three different lives hang in the balance....

What if your world were rapidly running out of tomorrows? And what if the only way to save the future was to relive the past? But which past holds the key to survival? That's the life-and-death question faced by three desperate people separated by the past, present, and future but who share a single terrifying reality. A tortured soul, brain-damaged in a motorcycle accident, issues a pirate broadcast out of a van in near-future California. In Depression-era San Francisco an architect with an inoperable brain tumor seeks a mystical cure. A post-human space traveler caught in a cosmic accident searches for a way to reconstruct himself and the future. In Mark Budz's spellbinding narrative, their lives--and deaths--are drawn together by a force even more powerful than destiny.