Sunrise Alley
 SHE WAS RUNNING FROM A RUTHLESS CRIMINAL
ACCOMPANIED BY SOMEONE MORE THAN HUMAN . . .
When the shipwrecked stranger washed up, nearly drowned, on the beach near research scientist Samantha Bryton's home, she was unaware that he was something more than human: an experiment conducted by Charon, a notorious criminal and practitioner of illegal robotics and android research. The man said his name was Turner Pascal—but Pascal was dead, killed in a car wreck. Then she found that Charon was experimenting with copying the minds of humans into android brains, implanted in human bodies to escape detection, planning to make his own army of slaves that will follow his orders without question.
Samantha and Turner quickly found themselves on the run across the country, pursued by the most ruthless criminal of the twenty-first century. In desperation, Samantha decided to seek help from Sunrise Alley, an underground organization of AIs that had gone rogue. But these cybernetic outlaws were rumored to have their own hidden agenda, not necessarily congruent with humanity's welfare, and Samantha feared that her only hope would prove forlorn. . . .
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Catherine Asaro is a Nebula Award winner for her novel The Quantum Rose, part of her popular Skolian Empire series. Her novels have three times been named the best science fiction novel of the year by Romantic Times Book Club. She has also won numerous other awards, including the Analog Readers Poll award, the Homer, and the Sapphire. She has an M.A. in physics, and a Ph.D. in chemical physics, both from Harvard, and has done research at the University of Toronto, The Max Planck Institute, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. A former ballet and jazz dancer, she founded the Mainly Jazz Dance program at Harvard and danced on both the west and east coasts. She has written eleven novels in the popular Skolian Saga, the latest being Schism: Triad, Book I (Tor, 2004), several fantasies, including The Charmed Sphere, as well as two near-future technothrillers, The Veiled Web and The Phoenix Code. She currently runs Molecudyne Research and lives in Maryland with her husband and daughter.
Illustration by Jeff Easley
Cover design by Carol Russo Design
|
 Hardcover
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
First printing, August 2004
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Printed in the United States of America |
ISBN: 0-7434-8840-7
Copyright 2004 by Catherine Asaro
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
http://www.baen.com
Production by Windhaven Press
Auburn, NH
Electronic version by WebWrights
http://www.webwrights.com |
To my mother-in-law, Jeanine Cannizzo, with love.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following readers for their much-appreciated input. Their comments have made this a better book. Any mistakes that remain were introduced by small, pernicious gremlins bent on mischief.
To Andrew Burt, Jeri Smith-Ready, and Tricia Schwaab for their excellent reading and comments on the manuscript. To Aly's Writing Group, for their insightful critiques of scenes: Aly Parsons, Simcha Kuritzky, Connie Warner, Al Carroll, and J. G. Huckenpöler. And to Susan Grant, my cousin Joe Scudder, and my brother-in-law Jimmy Cannizzo for their kindness in answering questions and reading scenes.
Special thanks to my editor, Toni Weisskopf, to my publisher, Jim Baen, and to Marla Ainspan, Nancy Hanger, Andrew Phillips, and the many other fine people at Baen who made this book possible; to Binnie Braunstein, for all her work on my behalf; and to Eleanor Wood, my much-appreciated agent.
A heartfelt thanks to the shining lights in my life, my husband, John Cannizzo, and my daughter, Cathy, for their love and support.
|