"When they told you surveillance was control? They lied.
The future of control is your biology.
There’s a reason the Federal Virtual Detention Construct at Angola is black from orbit. Forget solitary, you’re force-hibernated: reliving endless variants of your darkest decisions, the state rewriting your morality at the genetic level, killing and re-killing even your own children until the edit holds. Resist, and you’re priced for protein salvage. Comply and “you” won’t be worth a backup. But your obedience—uncrackable and unhackable—will command trillions.
PRISM is the program. And locked inside is our battle-scarred hero, Baz Covane.
After Grand Theft AI, Ria Rose and her crew bolted off grid but left a shattered world behind. Psychopathic technocrat Ken Cates has leveraged a brutal crackdown: half a million android infantry rounding up anyone suspected of species betrayal.
Cybernetic implants with superhuman strengths aren’t just a liability now, but a curse. Augment Codes weaponize the 3/5ths Rule, stripping any body modified over 40% of their human rights and synthregating the masses into a system of urban augment wards, or worse …
FVDC Angola. The Alcatraz of the South.
When Baz gets locked up, Ria must mastermind an infiltration that will pit AI against AI and dare each crew member to gamble with their own body, literally—mod your bones, swap your skin, and trade every limb for limb until the whole damn corpus sits on ice. Anything to smash what they’re editing us all to become.
Because the fight for survival isn’t against the system.
It’s over who gets to decide what we are."
"“The Matrix meets Blade Runner.” — Nicholas Sansbury Smith, New York Times bestselling author of Hell Divers
San Francisco, 2051. Rising like neo-Shanghai over the Bay, a labyrinth of quantum accelerators, hologram dreams, and fiercely regulated androids. Forget powder, pills, or bud—kids get high slotting wafers of data under the ear, and they’ll pay fat ¢rypto for the best. At the hottest nightclub in the city … the Fang.
Baz Covane is a battle-scarred thief who sticks to small-time bots. Ria Rose is the underworld “fixer” with a big-time score that could easily get ’em both killed. ’Cuz the Fang’s psychotic kingpin Otto Rex has a vault with more security than a fusion reactor. And the glass inside is priceless—enough to set up Baz, Ria, and their crack team of cyber-misfits on the white sands of Tahiti forever.
But this crime doesn’t just carry infinite VR-Prison time—it’s Baz and Ria’s last shot at redemption. Forced to confess every last secret on their neurals, they’ll have to trust each other completely if they stand any chance of infiltrating Otto’s lair, raiding its spiraling rings of physical and virtual firewalls, to finally hack into his mind and crack his deepest layer of security, before the Blackhawks touch down with federal warrants—for Grand Theft AI.
Performed by award-winning voice actor and musician Troy Baker, best known for his video game roles, including Joel Miller in The Last of Us franchise, Booker DeWitt in BioShock Infinite, and Samuel “Sam” Drake in Uncharted 4."
Join our community for the latest bookish news, reading recommendations, exclusive opening extracts, author events and competitions. It\'s all free. And enter a monthly draw to win a £50 Gift Card. See past winners here