When the murder of a presidential candidate is covered up, the witness to the crime is the one on the run.In the violent, misogynistic, technologically innovative world of Maxcon, a wildly popular hedonistic mixture of sporting spectacle and virtual experience, power over others is the prevailing ethos, and this bleeds into the dystopian world in which it thrives, where empathy is a weakness, and if you get hurt, you had it coming. The end justifies the means Truth and reality are relative concepts, depending on what serves those in power.Thus when Antaeus Smith, a young Maxcon athlete, witnesses aging superstar and newly named VP candidate, Lucifer Sampson, kill the maverick founder of the Maxcon empire, Wellington Gains, in a violent explosion of ego-driven rage, a doctored video of Smith beating a 'service girl' to death, and then killing a man who helped him escape, immediately dominates the media in order to poison his testimony. Meanwhile, an assassination attempt is staged to cover for the disappearance of Gains from the campaign, while arousing support for his candidacy and ensuring his victory. The mastermind of all this, co-founder Vincent Welles, will use the enormously popular Sampson as his front.Brittney Watson, enlightened blogger, sexy stripper, single mother, is a voice of opposition to the powerful and pervasive Maxcon empire and its use of interactive technology to manipulate the minds and desires of its subscribers in sport, pornography, and gambling (and now politics) which has had a corrosive and coarsening effect on society, unacknowledged by those seduced by it. The Maxcon platform injects its subscribers into an augmented reality narrative that they believe they control, but which controls them through algorithmic remediation of their input, which in turn, they remember as their intent.Brought together circumstantially through her crippled son, a huge fan of the sport, Watson and Smith seek the help of Beowulf Baird, the creator of the mind/body interface on which Maxcon made its name and fortune. Disillusioned by how his innovations were stolen and misused, and having had his heart broken by the woman he loved leaving him, he has been a recluse for ten years.It is up to the three of them to return to the command center of Maxcon in order to download the evidence of the crime, recorded on the performance chip embedded in Smith's brain, without being apprehended, and then to expose the cover-up, and reveal the Truth.
