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The Extractionist
Kimberly Unger
2023 Philip K. Dick Award Winner
“Unger (Nucleation), a game designer and VR programmer by day, delivers an edge-of-your-seat technothriller.”
—Library Journal
In her breakout new technothriller, virtual reality expert Kimberly Unger has created the iconic nerd-heroine that we need: Eliza McKay, a disgraced underground hacker trying to take back her career one dangerous job at a time. When rich or important people get stuck in the Swim it’s McKay’s task to quietly extract them. But when her latest contract throws her into the middle of a corporate power struggle, she finds herself fighting for her life.
ISBN: Trade paperback 978-1-61696-376-7; Digital 978-1-61696-377-4
Published: July 2022
Available Format(s): Trade Paperback and Digital
PHILLIP K. DICK AWARD WINNER
In her breakout technothriller, virtual reality expert Kimberly Unger has created the iconic, badass, nerdy heroine that you desperately need: Eliza McKay. McKay is disgraced underground hacker who is just trying to take back her career one dangerous job at a time. But when her latest contract throws her into the middle of a corporate power struggle, she finds herself fighting for her life in both the real and digital worlds.
“Cyberpunk fans won’t want to miss this.”
—Publishers Weekly
Eliza McKay is, by extreme necessity, a low-profile Extractionist. McKay is an expert in the virtual reality space where minds are uploaded as digital personas. When rich or important people get stuck in the Swim for reasons that are sleazy, illegal, or merely unlucky—it’s her job to quietly extract them. And McKay’s job just got a lot more dangerous.
After McKay repels an attack on her Swim persona, hired thugs break into her house to try to hack her cybernetic implants directly. Meanwhile, the corporate executive she was hired to rescue from VR space is surprisingly reluctant to be extracted. Something is lurking in the Swim, and some very powerful people will stop at nothing to keep it secret. This job might be the big break McKay has been waiting for to reboot her career—if she can survive long enough to beat the hackers at their own game.
In The Extractionist, virtual reality and gaming expert Kimberly Unger (Nucleation) has created an unforgettable cyberplayground where the rich still make their own rules, but a skilled operator remains the wildcard.
Gizmodo July New Science Fiction and Fantasy Books
“Unger (Nucleation) makes hacking come alive in this fast-paced techno-thriller centered on the Swim, a virtual reality accessed by uploading a ‘persona,’ or a copy of the users mind, then downloading it again to retain the memories of the experience. Eliza McKay relies on her quick thinking and the computer system wired into her brain to make a living extracting people who’ve gotten stuck in the Swim. When the government hires McKay to extract agent Mike Miyamoto, it appears to be a normal job—except Mike’s in the Swim on a criminal investigation, and what he’s discovered has changed him so much that his persona refuses to reintegrate into the self he left behind. McKay must race the clock to extract him—but she’s not the only one who wants what Mike knows, and her adversaries are willing to go to any lengths to stop McKay from reaching him first. VR programmer Unger mines her expertise to create all too believable scenarios and creative solutions, and the novel’s at its best in the vivid, evocative descriptions of how hacking feels to a mind fully immersed in VR. The story dances between two worlds just as real as each other, pulling the reader along to an explosive conclusion. Cyberpunk fans won’t want to miss this.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In a future where people have computers wired into their brains, programmers have gone well beyond virtual reality and created a place called The Swim, where the virtual becomes reality. Eliza McKay is an extractionist who pulls out people who have gone too deep and can no longer reconcile mind and body. She is trying to put her life and career back together after a disastrous experiment got her security clearance pulled. Her newest job seems like a simple extraction, but when the man she’s hired to extract refuses to go and warns her about a member of his team, she realizes there is a lot more going on. Soon, goons are showing up at her home, and the hacker is getting hacked. She’s no longer sure who she can trust: the man she was hired to extract, the secretive government employees who hired her, the tech genius who claims to need her help, or even The Swim itself. VERDICT Unger (Nucleation), a game designer and VR programmer by day, delivers an edge-of-your-seat technothriller with a refreshingly relatable protagonist….”
—Library Journal
“The Extractionist reads like a cybernetic thriller, with lots of danger and double crosses. The Swim feels like a character all its own, with plenty of detail to help visualize what it might be like to explore an abstract, immersive online world. There’s a small cast of characters that helps McKay as she gets in and out of trouble; Spike, an artificial intelligence that McKay helped create, is a particular standout and serves as a friendly foil to our heroine. Recommended for fans of Annalee Newitz, Neal Stephenson, and of course, William Gibson.”
—Booklist
“Kimberly Unger reimagines cyberpunk from the ground up to deliver a smart, fully immersive thriller.”
—Wil McCarthy, author of Rich Man’s Sky and the Queendom of Sol series
“Our heroine is a business consultant, but we live in her cyborg brain, we see every detail through her augmented eyes, and the future world she haunts is crammed with invention to the point of psychedelia. I quite enjoyed this.”
—Bruce Sterling, author of Schismatrix
“Hooray for author Kimberly Unger’s detailed vision of a cybernetic near-future in the technothriller, The Extractionist! We need more heroines like Eliza McKay, who are tough enough and smart enough to withstand the convergence of raw emotion and technology.”
—Sande Chen, video game writer, The Witcher
“A fast paced and complex tale of corporate and governmental intrigue, Unger has given the world another winner.”
—Joseph Karpierz, MT Void
“The plot’s tempo–and tightly woven intricacies–are a wonder to behold, and, yes, quite thrilling, as a reader.”
—Locus
“This fast-paced and dazzling near-future technothriller has a lot of fun with cyberpunk tropes as we follow Eliza McKay, a freelance super-hacker who specializes in rescuing people stuck in hyper-realistic immersive VR.’”
—Hero Magazine
“The Extractionist expertly harnesses the author’s deep immersive knowledge of current and extrapolative technology to provide a comprehensive and realistic view of the future of the Internet, the Swim, and the future of nanotechnology. The novel is ably centered and grounded around a complex and well-drawn protagonist whose cutting edge technology may yet cut her deeply as well. Unger’s novel stands as a beacon of near future SF with a future of the internet and nanotech that is immersively and eminently plausible. The novel bonds a technothriller plot with an engaging and turn-paging story. The Extractionist takes the reader from the future of Internet cafes in a near future San Francisco to the depths of the Swim and what lurks in the dark depths of this all too plausible future of the Internet.”
—Paul Weimer, SFF reviewer and critic
“Kimberly Unger’s The Extractionist is next-generation science fiction. It fuses cyberpunk attitude with diamond-hard science and alarming plausibility. Unger is one to watch.”
—James L. Cambias, author of The Godel Operation
“Unger writes with the ease of familiarity with challenging technical material, so that even if I couldn’t explain what was happening, I knew she could. The sureness of an author’s voice can carry us into worlds and situations we’ve never experienced for ourselves. Unger’s work is cutting-edge science fiction.”
—Deborah J. Ross, author of The Seven-Petaled Shield
“A thrilling and imaginative cyberpunk adventure that masterfully blends cutting-edge technology, virtual reality, and a gripping mystery. This fast-paced novel, winner of the prestigious 2023 Philip K. Dick Award, showcases Unger’s expertise as a game designer and futurist, creating a vivid and immersive world that will captivate science fiction fans. . . . A must-read for fans of cyberpunk and science fiction thrillers.”
—Hidden Sci-Fi
“Eliza Nurey Wynona McKay is a fascinating protagonist. She’s a flawed character in the classic cyberpunk noir tradition, but she’s never a cliché. The job McKay takes on is full of twists and surprises. I loved this book.”
—Feeding Squirrels On My Way To Work
Kimberly Unger is the Philip K. Dick Award-winning author of Nucleation and The Extractionist. Unger made her first videogame back when the 80-column card was the new hot thing and followed that up with degrees in English/Writing from UC Davis and Illustration from the Art Center College of Design. Nowadays she produces narrative-games for VR, lectures on the intersection of art and code for UCSC’s master’s program and writes science fiction about how all these app-driven superpowers are going to change the human race.
(TL;dr: Unger writes about fast robots, big explosions, and space things.)
Kimberly Unger lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she works in the future of VR on the Meta-Oculus gaming platform.
Praise for Nucleation
2020 Washington Post Gift Guide selection 2020 UK Guardian Gift Guide selection 2020 Den of Geek Top Sci-Fi Books
“Science fiction fans will be captivated by Unger’s smart, plausible vision of the future of space travel, especially the elegant solution of utilizing quantum entanglement to communicate across light years.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This smart, gripping debut weaves technology, embodiment, and corporate espionage into a tense vision of the future that readers won’t be able to put down.”
—Jacqueline Koyanagi, author of Ascension
“[Nucleation is a] debut[s] worth checking out . . . show[s] that new voices continue to expand the genre”
—Washington Post
“A superb, smart debut. . . . I can’t wait to read more from Unger, a welcome new voice in science fiction.”
—Lissa Price, internationally bestselling author of the Starters series
“Dialog among rivals, teammates, and machine interfaces keeps the story moving quickly. Recommended for fans of technothrillers and those who appreciate a strong lead character.
—Library Journal
“In technology we so often look to science fiction for inspiration. Kimberly Unger is the rare author with a foot in both worlds and it shows as she gives a thrilling glimpse into the future with Nucleation.”
—Andrew Bosworth, Vice President of Augmented and Virtual Reality, Facebook
“If Grisham was a better wordsmith and chose to write hard sf thrillers, it would look a lot like Kimberly Unger’s gripping Nucleation.
—Charles Gannon, author of the Caine Riordan series.
“Nucleation delivers top-notch suspense, deftly weaving together industrial espionage and first contact in a futuristic world that is all too plausible.”
—Juliette Wade, author of Mazes of Power
“A near-future, tech-driven thriller marked by grounded characters, wondrous discovery, and a compelling mystery at its core.”
—Joseph Mallozzi, Executive Producer, Dark Matter, Stargate’s SG-1, Atlantis, Universe
“ Unger’s Nucleation delivers a rich world-building experience on top of a narrative that grabs at you and satisfies that urge for something fresh.”
—Kate Edwards, Executive Director of The Global Game Jam
“With Nucleation, Kimberly Unger offers a richly detailed, thought-provoking peek into our not-so distant future and a mind-blowing means of taking us to the stars.”
—Dayton Ward, author of Star Trek: Kirk Fu Manual
“Unger weaves real-world insights about virtual reality, technology, and art into a space opera packed with high adventure and dastardly intrigue.”
—Eliot Peper, author of Veil and Breach
“Taut and snappy, Nucleation is solid science fiction with a whole lot of heart.”
—Cat Rambo, author of Carpe Glitter
“This debut novel is recommended for fans of Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2003) and Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, as well as for readers who like their cutting-edge technology with a bit of danger on the side.”
—Booklist
“Nucleation is an immersive tale that has blockbuster scale and emotional story-telling you won’t soon forget.”
—Terry Matalas, showrunner, Star Trek: Picard
“I picked up Nucleation expecting a standard space opera. What I got was a thriller that kept me occupied for days.” —Lightspeed Magazine
It was inevitable that the client would pop up again. There had been a meeting scheduled, after all, and she hadn’t come across as easy to rattle. There were only a half dozen people in the world who could perform an extraction, who could pull a person’s mind out of the virtual space of the Swim, even if they didn’t want to go quietly. It meant this potential client’s options were limited. If she’d gotten all the way down the list of experts to Eliza’s name, it meant she was serious.
McKay’s first action, once safely away, was to ask the Overlay to pull all the woman’s salient details, and the AI had come up empty. Contradictions. No presence meant she was likely covered by one of the Big Three intelligence agencies. Anything involving those guys means you’re back under the microscope again. Having US InfoComm breathing down your neck was no fun, and they were the “good guys” of the lot. If they were involved, you could bet that Euro InTech and the Ministry were keeping tabs as well. It had taken her years of staying under the radar to even be able to leave the US without a check-in or a phone call. McKay wasn’t interested in revisiting that state of affairs if she could help it. Back when she still had all her programming licenses intact, she’d been able to afford the lawyers to save herself. That effort had burned through almost every asset she had saved up. Extractions didn’t pay well enough for her to survive a second round of deep investigation.
Spread-eagled on the hotel bed, Overlay open wide to the Swim, soaking up the aircon and catching up with her billing, McKay felt the woman enter the lobby nearly thirty-five stories below.
Found me already? She reached out with just a corner of her mind to tap into and fiddle with the hotel’s guest registry. She shifted the dates here and there to make it seem as if the woman had just missed her. She knew McKay was in town, and there was only one flight a day to San Francisco. It would be foolish simply to wipe herself from the registry entirely. She’d had a number of interesting clients in the past, a few missed connections, but it was rare that anyone pursued her outside normal channels. Big Three, she reminded herself. A simple extraction isn’t worth tangling with the Big Three again. That allure was still there, though . . . working on something important, something game-changing. They just never tell you that changing the game too much is as bad as not changing it at all. Critical success as failure point.
But that reminder lost some of its power every time she said it. Her natural curiosity, her desire to find a way to fix things, to perfect the system, kept bubbling to the fore.
She closed her eyes and slipped a little further into the Swim of digital space. There were limits to what the computers built into her head could do, but she was going for subtlety. This was information gathering, not online warfare. Yet.
The Client stopped at the front desk, and McKay felt the computer systems giving way. Access probed, guided, caressed, and set free again by someone else’s invisible hand. Oh, interesting. The numbers and connections paraded across her vision made the Client seem surrounded by a hard-edged halo of information. You could tell a lot about any given person by the nature and composition of that halo. In the Client’s case, the halo wasn’t hers; she was borrowing it from someone else. People moved through the world adding to and altering the flow of data, like fish in a river, sometimes moving with the current, sometimes against, but every languid flip of the tail or swipe of a credit card made changes. Someone like McKay, intimate with the flows and currents of information invisibly pervading every square inch of atmosphere, couldn’t help but see that halo streak in from elsewhere, wrap her in a protective cocoon, and return to its source. So who are you supposed to be today?
She took a closer look at the client’s borrowed digital plumage. Normally her business depended on discretion. Normally she limited the scope of her checks on potential clients. Normally she didn’t need to know every detail of the whos, whens, and wherefores of the people involved to do the job. Normally, however, clients stuck more or less to the basic procedures that went with any contractual transaction. But if we’re dealing with something bigger than a teenage tech magnate stuck in a virtual porn site, maybe it’s worth the extra effort.
Extractions were often an awkward business. Seven out of ten times the person whose mind got stuck in the Swim was doing something that, while not necessarily illegal, was often socially embarrassing—either for the person directly involved or at least for the people around them. Even people who understood that an extraction was “optional” were still willing to pay up front for the process, just in case something important had been discovered that they wanted to remember. Since she’d set up shop, she had walked away from only two jobs. One paid far too well, and the family involved was in love with media attention. That type of scrutiny would simply bring her back up onto everybody’s radar and there were still people in the Big Three who thought a bullet to the head was the best way to keep her retired.
The Extractionist
Kimberly Unger
2023 Philip K. Dick Award Winner
“Unger (Nucleation), a game designer and VR programmer by day, delivers an edge-of-your-seat technothriller.”
—Library Journal
In her breakout new technothriller, virtual reality expert Kimberly Unger has created the iconic nerd-heroine that we need: Eliza McKay, a disgraced underground hacker trying to take back her career one dangerous job at a time. When rich or important people get stuck in the Swim it’s McKay’s task to quietly extract them. But when her latest contract throws her into the middle of a corporate power struggle, she finds herself fighting for her life.
The Extractionist
by Kimberly Unger
ISBN: Trade paperback 978-1-61696-376-7; Digital 978-1-61696-377-4
Published: July 2022
Available Format(s): Trade Paperback and Digital
PHILLIP K. DICK AWARD WINNER
In her breakout technothriller, virtual reality expert Kimberly Unger has created the iconic, badass, nerdy heroine that you desperately need: Eliza McKay. McKay is disgraced underground hacker who is just trying to take back her career one dangerous job at a time. But when her latest contract throws her into the middle of a corporate power struggle, she finds herself fighting for her life in both the real and digital worlds.
“Cyberpunk fans won’t want to miss this.”
—Publishers Weekly
Eliza McKay is, by extreme necessity, a low-profile Extractionist. McKay is an expert in the virtual reality space where minds are uploaded as digital personas. When rich or important people get stuck in the Swim for reasons that are sleazy, illegal, or merely unlucky—it’s her job to quietly extract them. And McKay’s job just got a lot more dangerous.
After McKay repels an attack on her Swim persona, hired thugs break into her house to try to hack her cybernetic implants directly. Meanwhile, the corporate executive she was hired to rescue from VR space is surprisingly reluctant to be extracted. Something is lurking in the Swim, and some very powerful people will stop at nothing to keep it secret. This job might be the big break McKay has been waiting for to reboot her career—if she can survive long enough to beat the hackers at their own game.
In The Extractionist, virtual reality and gaming expert Kimberly Unger (Nucleation) has created an unforgettable cyberplayground where the rich still make their own rules, but a skilled operator remains the wildcard.
Gizmodo July New Science Fiction and Fantasy Books
“Unger (Nucleation) makes hacking come alive in this fast-paced techno-thriller centered on the Swim, a virtual reality accessed by uploading a ‘persona,’ or a copy of the users mind, then downloading it again to retain the memories of the experience. Eliza McKay relies on her quick thinking and the computer system wired into her brain to make a living extracting people who’ve gotten stuck in the Swim. When the government hires McKay to extract agent Mike Miyamoto, it appears to be a normal job—except Mike’s in the Swim on a criminal investigation, and what he’s discovered has changed him so much that his persona refuses to reintegrate into the self he left behind. McKay must race the clock to extract him—but she’s not the only one who wants what Mike knows, and her adversaries are willing to go to any lengths to stop McKay from reaching him first. VR programmer Unger mines her expertise to create all too believable scenarios and creative solutions, and the novel’s at its best in the vivid, evocative descriptions of how hacking feels to a mind fully immersed in VR. The story dances between two worlds just as real as each other, pulling the reader along to an explosive conclusion. Cyberpunk fans won’t want to miss this.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In a future where people have computers wired into their brains, programmers have gone well beyond virtual reality and created a place called The Swim, where the virtual becomes reality. Eliza McKay is an extractionist who pulls out people who have gone too deep and can no longer reconcile mind and body. She is trying to put her life and career back together after a disastrous experiment got her security clearance pulled. Her newest job seems like a simple extraction, but when the man she’s hired to extract refuses to go and warns her about a member of his team, she realizes there is a lot more going on. Soon, goons are showing up at her home, and the hacker is getting hacked. She’s no longer sure who she can trust: the man she was hired to extract, the secretive government employees who hired her, the tech genius who claims to need her help, or even The Swim itself. VERDICT Unger (Nucleation), a game designer and VR programmer by day, delivers an edge-of-your-seat technothriller with a refreshingly relatable protagonist….”
—Library Journal
“The Extractionist reads like a cybernetic thriller, with lots of danger and double crosses. The Swim feels like a character all its own, with plenty of detail to help visualize what it might be like to explore an abstract, immersive online world. There’s a small cast of characters that helps McKay as she gets in and out of trouble; Spike, an artificial intelligence that McKay helped create, is a particular standout and serves as a friendly foil to our heroine. Recommended for fans of Annalee Newitz, Neal Stephenson, and of course, William Gibson.”
—Booklist
“Kimberly Unger reimagines cyberpunk from the ground up to deliver a smart, fully immersive thriller.”
—Wil McCarthy, author of Rich Man’s Sky and the Queendom of Sol series
“Our heroine is a business consultant, but we live in her cyborg brain, we see every detail through her augmented eyes, and the future world she haunts is crammed with invention to the point of psychedelia. I quite enjoyed this.”
—Bruce Sterling, author of Schismatrix
“Hooray for author Kimberly Unger’s detailed vision of a cybernetic near-future in the technothriller, The Extractionist! We need more heroines like Eliza McKay, who are tough enough and smart enough to withstand the convergence of raw emotion and technology.”
—Sande Chen, video game writer, The Witcher
“A fast paced and complex tale of corporate and governmental intrigue, Unger has given the world another winner.”
—Joseph Karpierz, MT Void
“The plot’s tempo–and tightly woven intricacies–are a wonder to behold, and, yes, quite thrilling, as a reader.”
—Locus
“This fast-paced and dazzling near-future technothriller has a lot of fun with cyberpunk tropes as we follow Eliza McKay, a freelance super-hacker who specializes in rescuing people stuck in hyper-realistic immersive VR.’”
—Hero Magazine
“The Extractionist expertly harnesses the author’s deep immersive knowledge of current and extrapolative technology to provide a comprehensive and realistic view of the future of the Internet, the Swim, and the future of nanotechnology. The novel is ably centered and grounded around a complex and well-drawn protagonist whose cutting edge technology may yet cut her deeply as well. Unger’s novel stands as a beacon of near future SF with a future of the internet and nanotech that is immersively and eminently plausible. The novel bonds a technothriller plot with an engaging and turn-paging story. The Extractionist takes the reader from the future of Internet cafes in a near future San Francisco to the depths of the Swim and what lurks in the dark depths of this all too plausible future of the Internet.”
—Paul Weimer, SFF reviewer and critic
“Kimberly Unger’s The Extractionist is next-generation science fiction. It fuses cyberpunk attitude with diamond-hard science and alarming plausibility. Unger is one to watch.”
—James L. Cambias, author of The Godel Operation
“Unger writes with the ease of familiarity with challenging technical material, so that even if I couldn’t explain what was happening, I knew she could. The sureness of an author’s voice can carry us into worlds and situations we’ve never experienced for ourselves. Unger’s work is cutting-edge science fiction.”
—Deborah J. Ross, author of The Seven-Petaled Shield
“A thrilling and imaginative cyberpunk adventure that masterfully blends cutting-edge technology, virtual reality, and a gripping mystery. This fast-paced novel, winner of the prestigious 2023 Philip K. Dick Award, showcases Unger’s expertise as a game designer and futurist, creating a vivid and immersive world that will captivate science fiction fans. . . . A must-read for fans of cyberpunk and science fiction thrillers.”
—Hidden Sci-Fi
“Eliza Nurey Wynona McKay is a fascinating protagonist. She’s a flawed character in the classic cyberpunk noir tradition, but she’s never a cliché. The job McKay takes on is full of twists and surprises. I loved this book.”
—Feeding Squirrels On My Way To Work
(TL;dr: Unger writes about fast robots, big explosions, and space things.)
Kimberly Unger lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she works in the future of VR on the Meta-Oculus gaming platform.
Praise for Nucleation
2020 Washington Post Gift Guide selection
2020 UK Guardian Gift Guide selection
2020 Den of Geek Top Sci-Fi Books
“Science fiction fans will be captivated by Unger’s smart, plausible vision of the future of space travel, especially the elegant solution of utilizing quantum entanglement to communicate across light years.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This smart, gripping debut weaves technology, embodiment, and corporate espionage into a tense vision of the future that readers won’t be able to put down.”
—Jacqueline Koyanagi, author of Ascension
“[Nucleation is a] debut[s] worth checking out . . . show[s] that new voices continue to expand the genre”
—Washington Post
“A superb, smart debut. . . . I can’t wait to read more from Unger, a welcome new voice in science fiction.”
—Lissa Price, internationally bestselling author of the Starters series
“Dialog among rivals, teammates, and machine interfaces keeps the story moving quickly. Recommended for fans of technothrillers and those who appreciate a strong lead character.
—Library Journal
“In technology we so often look to science fiction for inspiration. Kimberly Unger is the rare author with a foot in both worlds and it shows as she gives a thrilling glimpse into the future with Nucleation.”
—Andrew Bosworth, Vice President of Augmented and Virtual Reality, Facebook
“If Grisham was a better wordsmith and chose to write hard sf thrillers, it would look a lot like Kimberly Unger’s gripping Nucleation.
—Charles Gannon, author of the Caine Riordan series.
“Nucleation delivers top-notch suspense, deftly weaving together industrial espionage and first contact in a futuristic world that is all too plausible.”
—Juliette Wade, author of Mazes of Power
“A near-future, tech-driven thriller marked by grounded characters, wondrous discovery, and a compelling mystery at its core.”
—Joseph Mallozzi, Executive Producer, Dark Matter, Stargate’s SG-1, Atlantis, Universe
“ Unger’s Nucleation delivers a rich world-building experience on top of a narrative that grabs at you and satisfies that urge for something fresh.”
—Kate Edwards, Executive Director of The Global Game Jam
“With Nucleation, Kimberly Unger offers a richly detailed, thought-provoking peek into our not-so distant future and a mind-blowing means of taking us to the stars.”
—Dayton Ward, author of Star Trek: Kirk Fu Manual
“Unger weaves real-world insights about virtual reality, technology, and art into a space opera packed with high adventure and dastardly intrigue.”
—Eliot Peper, author of Veil and Breach
“Taut and snappy, Nucleation is solid science fiction with a whole lot of heart.”
—Cat Rambo, author of Carpe Glitter
“This debut novel is recommended for fans of Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2003) and Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, as well as for readers who like their cutting-edge technology with a bit of danger on the side.”
—Booklist
“Nucleation is an immersive tale that has blockbuster scale and emotional story-telling you won’t soon forget.”
—Terry Matalas, showrunner, Star Trek: Picard
“I picked up Nucleation expecting a standard space opera. What I got was a thriller that kept me occupied for days.”
—Lightspeed Magazine
Visit Kimberly Unger on her website or on Twitter
It was inevitable that the client would pop up again. There had been a meeting scheduled, after all, and she hadn’t come across as easy to rattle. There were only a half dozen people in the world who could perform an extraction, who could pull a person’s mind out of the virtual space of the Swim, even if they didn’t want to go quietly. It meant this potential client’s options were limited. If she’d gotten all the way down the list of experts to Eliza’s name, it meant she was serious.
McKay’s first action, once safely away, was to ask the Overlay to pull all the woman’s salient details, and the AI had come up empty. Contradictions. No presence meant she was likely covered by one of the Big Three intelligence agencies. Anything involving those guys means you’re back under the microscope again. Having US InfoComm breathing down your neck was no fun, and they were the “good guys” of the lot. If they were involved, you could bet that Euro InTech and the Ministry were keeping tabs as well. It had taken her years of staying under the radar to even be able to leave the US without a check-in or a phone call. McKay wasn’t interested in revisiting that state of affairs if she could help it. Back when she still had all her programming licenses intact, she’d been able to afford the lawyers to save herself. That effort had burned through almost every asset she had saved up. Extractions didn’t pay well enough for her to survive a second round of deep investigation.
Spread-eagled on the hotel bed, Overlay open wide to the Swim, soaking up the aircon and catching up with her billing, McKay felt the woman enter the lobby nearly thirty-five stories below.
Found me already? She reached out with just a corner of her mind to tap into and fiddle with the hotel’s guest registry. She shifted the dates here and there to make it seem as if the woman had just missed her. She knew McKay was in town, and there was only one flight a day to San Francisco. It would be foolish simply to wipe herself from the registry entirely. She’d had a number of interesting clients in the past, a few missed connections, but it was rare that anyone pursued her outside normal channels. Big Three, she reminded herself. A simple extraction isn’t worth tangling with the Big Three again. That allure was still there, though . . . working on something important, something game-changing. They just never tell you that changing the game too much is as bad as not changing it at all. Critical success as failure point.
But that reminder lost some of its power every time she said it. Her natural curiosity, her desire to find a way to fix things, to perfect the system, kept bubbling to the fore.
She closed her eyes and slipped a little further into the Swim of digital space. There were limits to what the computers built into her head could do, but she was going for subtlety. This was information gathering, not online warfare. Yet.
The Client stopped at the front desk, and McKay felt the computer systems giving way. Access probed, guided, caressed, and set free again by someone else’s invisible hand. Oh, interesting. The numbers and connections paraded across her vision made the Client seem surrounded by a hard-edged halo of information. You could tell a lot about any given person by the nature and composition of that halo. In the Client’s case, the halo wasn’t hers; she was borrowing it from someone else. People moved through the world adding to and altering the flow of data, like fish in a river, sometimes moving with the current, sometimes against, but every languid flip of the tail or swipe of a credit card made changes. Someone like McKay, intimate with the flows and currents of information invisibly pervading every square inch of atmosphere, couldn’t help but see that halo streak in from elsewhere, wrap her in a protective cocoon, and return to its source. So who are you supposed to be today?
She took a closer look at the client’s borrowed digital plumage. Normally her business depended on discretion. Normally she limited the scope of her checks on potential clients. Normally she didn’t need to know every detail of the whos, whens, and wherefores of the people involved to do the job. Normally, however, clients stuck more or less to the basic procedures that went with any contractual transaction. But if we’re dealing with something bigger than a teenage tech magnate stuck in a virtual porn site, maybe it’s worth the extra effort.
Extractions were often an awkward business. Seven out of ten times the person whose mind got stuck in the Swim was doing something that, while not necessarily illegal, was often socially embarrassing—either for the person directly involved or at least for the people around them. Even people who understood that an extraction was “optional” were still willing to pay up front for the process, just in case something important had been discovered that they wanted to remember. Since she’d set up shop, she had walked away from only two jobs. One paid far too well, and the family involved was in love with media attention. That type of scrutiny would simply bring her back up onto everybody’s radar and there were still people in the Big Three who thought a bullet to the head was the best way to keep her retired.
Other books by this author…
Nucleation
Kimberly Unger
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