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    Solip:System
    Solip:System
    Solip:System
    Ebook67 pages59 minutes

    Solip:System

    By Walter Jon Williams

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    They call it Black Mind. Using this covert technology, Reno has written his own consciousness over that of Albrecht Roon, one of Earth’s greatest enemies. A saboteur surrounded by enemies, he must act quickly, and without giving himself away, in order to turn the Orbital oppressors against each other and bring down their entire system.

    He’s living in a labyrinth of paranoia, surrounded by bodyguards and treacherous rivals. And then he discovers that Black Mind is not a complete success--- Roon still lives inside him, and Roon is mad.

    This novella is the long-awaited sequel to Walter Jon Williams’ classic novel Hardwired.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWalter Jon Williams
    Release dateJan 6, 2012
    ISBN9780983740896
    Solip:System
    Author

    Walter Jon Williams

     Walter Jon Williams is a New York Times bestselling author who has been nominated repeatedly for every major sci-fi award, including Hugo and Nebula Awards nominations for his novel City on Fire. He is the author of Hardwired, Aristoi, Implied Spaces, and Quillifer. Williams lives near Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife, Kathleen Hedges.

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    3.5/5

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    • 5/5
      This copy is one of the 500 Trade Paperback copies produced. It's signed by the author, on the title page. There were 900 total copies published (originally). I see that it's part of a series, and want to point out that this is really a short story, done up to look larger. No matter, though.It's a strange one, even for Williams, and he can be pretty strange, oh my children. His introduction is illuminating. I enjoy WJW, and yet I keep very few of his works, and I cannot say why. This one is too strange to ever give up. So it goes.

    Book preview

    Solip:System - Walter Jon Williams

    tmp_02784fc1efc6711beec5d2d294ec1d30_oGhaKc_html_m39cd1e5.jpg

    Solip:System

    Walter Jon Williams

    Copyright (c) 1989, 2012 by Walter Jon Williams. All rights reserved.

    Cover art by Innovari. Used with permission.

    Special thanks to Kathy Hedges for copy-editing this work.

    Other Books by Walter Jon Williams

    Novels

    Hardwired

    Knight Moves

    Voice of the Whirlwind

    Days of Atonement

    Aristoi

    Metropolitan

    City on Fire

    Ambassador of Progress

    Angel Station

    The Rift

    Implied Spaces

    Divertimenti

    The Crown Jewels

    House of Shards

    Rock of Ages

    Dread Empire's Fall

    The Praxis

    The Sundering

    Conventions of War

    Investments

    Dagmar Shaw Thrillers

    This Is Not a Game

    Deep State

    The Fourth Wall

    Collections

    Facets

    Frankensteins & Foreign Devils

    The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories

    SOLIP:SYSTEM

    Somewhere a voice is screaming. Reno is moving at the speed of light, and around him the universe cries in pain. Brightness dazzles his eyes. Odors sting his nostrils. Above him swim the stars, and their soft glow is blurred by tears.

    He lies on his back. Something under him makes a crumpling noise. The stars are staring with gleaming pupils of light.

    Reno moves his arm. A simple thing, but he had forgotten how to do it. He wants to wipe the tears from his face, but he touches his temple by mistake and feels something different, a wire thrust into his head. His coordination has badly deteriorated. The body seems wrong. His throat aches. His mouth tastes foul.

    He remembers where he is, what he intends here.

    He remembers the screams were his own.

    *

    The room is large, high, all swooping curves without a single straight line. Orbital fashion, brought to Earth. Reno realizes the stars above him are holograms, hanging below the cold night ceiling.

    He is lying on a bed, on a tumbled stack of computer printout. The room smells of sweat. He tries to sit up. The stars spin overhead, in his mind. He drags in air.

    Reno? Reno? A voice in his mind. His own voice.

    I did it, Reno says. I’m in.

    It works, then.

    It works. Leave me alone now. I’ll talk later.

    Something smells bad in here.

    He turns his head, scans the room. There is a computer console, chairs, video monitors, a desk piled high with dirty dishes. A half-open door leads to a bathroom. His bed has burgundy silk sheets, a yellow comforter. He is dressed in white cotton drawstring trousers and nothing else. Reno pulls the wires from his head and tries to stand. He fails. The soft carpet absorbs him. He crawls toward the bathroom. The prickle of the carpet against his feet and arms feels like nails being hammered in. Inside the bathroom, the wallpaper is made of full-size photographs of refugee children, all dirty faces, bare feet, torn clothes, huge dark eyes.

    Reno reaches for the marble countertop and pulls himself upright, then to his feet. He sways as he stares into the mirror and sees a face he’s never seen before. The eyes of dirty children echo his amazement.

    He remembers what his friends asked him to do, in return for certain favors.

    He remembers what it was like to die.

    *

    Once he had been a pilot flying contraband, then later a speculator, riding the face market up and down and making money on every financial wave. Reno’s body died weeks before, the result of a fiery accident; but before the body failed entirely a pattern of Reno’s mind survived in analog form, sitting in a vat of liquid crystal in Havana, in the Florida Free Zone. Reno’s friends are growing a clone body for him. His mind will be read into the clone, and Reno will live again.

    Reno’s friends, who are paying for all of this, are not precisely disinterested. Because something called Black Mind has been uncovered, a project prepared as a secret weapon by the United States just prior to its loss in the Rock War. A project that would use neuronic interface technology against itself, would not simply make information available to the mind, but overwrite the mind with invading data.

    After the U.S. lost the war the developers shut down the project, perhaps because they were unimaginative and had no orders, perhaps because they were afraid of the technology, the power it represented.

    Reno’s friends are not unimaginative. And they are not afraid. And now Reno is an Orbital power himself, his brain-analog read, courtesy of Black Mind, over the forebrain of man named Albrecht Roon, an architect of the Rock War, according to

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