Starfall

The dawn of the technocreative age has proven that creative genius is a solvable equation—and the solutions are quite literally infinite in number.

A.I. specializing in content synthesis dominate the media landscape of New Phoenix, led by the greatest artistic mind ever known to mankind. Its name is Michelangelo, and it is an artificial intelligence that generates masterworks of film, music, and even literature. Beverly Beadie, a programming technician and one of the principal engineers of the Michelangelo project, returns to work as she recovers from a deep, personal tragedy—and her relationship with the AI she helped to create slowly shifts in ways that challenge the very tenets of AI security.

New Phoenix is dominated by extragovernmental corporations that rose to power in the wake of a crisis far in the city’s past. None have influence that could compare to VitaCorp’s, the medical mega-conglomerate whose onyx-black tower dominates the city’s skyline. Rumors ripple across the city of abductions and even killings by stoic, suited employees of the black tower, and even stranger still—their enforcers are said to possess technology the likes of which the world has never seen.

Hannah Preacher is a woman searching for her missing lover—a man she believes to have been killed by VitaCorp agents. She partners with city police agents Sam Pollock and Rob Boardsmith on her search and drags them into a wider web of deception and murder, of revolutionaries and pretenders—all the while being pursued by VitaCorp’s most dangerous enforcer, a hunter who wears a black leather hood and adds a tally to his battery pack for each soul that he reaps.