Listen, it’s 2001, the dust hasn’t even settled over the wreckage downtown, and Maxine Tarnow—fraud-investigator-at-large, mom, and defrocked CFE with a small-calibre Beretta tucked somewhere sensible—is already up to her sharp elbows in the sort of high-yield digital grift that usually requires a slide rule and a security clearance to comprehend.
Welcome to the lower-case bleeding edge, a sprawling, fiber-optic wonderland of dot-com venture capital, midnight server farms, and offshore shell accounts operating just beneath the floorboards of the late-capitalist dream machine. What starts as a routine audit of a shadowy web-security outfit called hashslingrz quickly devolves into an unmapped transit system of suspicious cash-flows, missing venture capital, and dark-fiber conduits leaking money toward unnamed destinations in the Middle East. Before she can even grab a decent bagel, Maxine’s getting pulled through a swirling, low-res vortex of freelance hackers, renegade coders hiding out in Deep Web mud-rooms, government creeps with tailored suits and zero pupils, and tech-bro impresarios who think they’ve transcended human mortality through proprietary algorithms.
The backdrop is a jittery, post-catastrophe Gotham—where the Otto Kugelblitz School on the Upper West Side keeps trying to re-educate the next generation out of their natural childhood paranoia, while the city around them transforms overnight into a surveillance panopticon, every dial-up modem humming its own low-register song of impending control.
Are these hyper-connected networks bringing us closer together, or are they just automated delivery systems for a brand-new flavor of paranoia? Maxine keeps digging through the data-trash, navigating school runs, ex-husband drama, and corporate hitmen, barreling straight toward the terrible, glittering center of the machine—hoping that somewhere along the line, before the server crashes for good, someone might accidentally leak the truth.