Recursion

How far will electronic surveillance and personal data mining go? What will it mean to be human in a world of manipulated reality? See for yourself.... Year 2210: Herb, an arrogant rich kid, returns to the isolated planet on which he has illegally been trying to build a city-and finds it destroyed by a swarming nightmare of self-replicating machinery. Worse, the all-seeing Environment Agency has been watching him all along. His punishment? He's sent to fight a nearly hopeless battle in the farthest reaches of the universe against enemy machines that are faster and more deadly than his own-in the company of a disarmingly confident AI who may not be exactly what he claims. Year 2051: Eva Rye desperately wants to die-the only way she can escape the nannies of the Social Care system. But when her well-planned suicide is thwarted, she winds up in an institution where she meets three people convinced that an evolving intelligence is behind the all-pervasive monitoring systems-a Watcher who has a special interest in Eva. Year 2119: Strange things are going on in Constantine's augmented head. Sometimes extra intelligences crowd his mind. Sometimes he sees gaps in the sky. But he can let nothing get in the way of his work, helping to build a cutting-edge Von Neumann machine-not even the realization that his life is nothing but a simulation of the real Constantine, created by a rival company to steal the VNM's secrets. All three stories converge to reveal the history of a nearly omnipotent AI, which has been molding human destiny for centuries. But is it humanity's loving parent...or its jealous god?