"In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person’s consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or 'sleeve') making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen. Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats “existence” as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning. . . ."
Case was the best out there – a hacker no one could beat, until his talent was
literally fried out of his brain. Working deals in the dark computer underground, he
has been offered his skills back – for a price.
When one of the best friends of Hiro Protagonist, hacker, samurai swordsman and pizza deliveryman, overdoses on a new designer drug called Snow Crash, he begins to investigate in a postmodern world where our Internet is known as the Metaverse and where every institution is privately controlled, even the government and the police.
Neo was an average man working a dead-end job during the day and performing online crimes at night, looking for the answer to the question that had plagued him all his life: What is the Matrix?
