Spendel

Jon is a dropout from the conventional world, though a star in the games world; Genet is a star in the conventional world, a builder of APs (artificial personalities) for use as PAs by very rich clients. They meet at the coffee shop where Jon earns a crust as the ’human face’ in the almost totally automated operation and where Genet works occasionally to get a break from her usual office. Despite the yawning gulf between them, they click and get together - until Genet is killed in a terrorist bombing. Jon is devastated... until he meets Genet’s virtual doppelganger... This is the third in a sequence of novelettes exploring interactions between humans and their future machine extensions and equivalents (the first two were ’Foam World’ and ’Protag’). The key characters in these books will eventually meet in the colony on mars.