Lady of Mazes
A Sequel to Stealing Worlds, a prequel to Ventus
If Stealing Worlds is the story of how AI could “break out” of human control in the near future, Lady of Mazes is about the ultimate fate of humanity after it does. If Ventus is the tale of the fallout from the death of a "god" (the rogue AI 3340), then Lady of Mazes is the story of 3340's birth. The three stories span a thousand years and dozens of worlds. Each focuses on one act in AI’s “divine comedy.” Where Stealing Worlds is about one young woman, Sura Neelin, trying to make her way in near-future Detroit, Lady of Mazes is a tour de force of far-future science and technology with the entire Solar system as its stage.
In a review at scifi.com, Paul Witcover described Lady of Mazes this way:
Far in the future, the vast ringworld of Teven Coronal—located in the Lethe Nebula, an enigmatic region of space beyond Jupiter—is home to millions of post-humans who occupy a spectrum of overlapping but distinct realities called manifolds. Each manifold is a culture unto itself, with a unique history, mythology and technology, its members the living expression of a particular Worldview determined hundreds of years ago by all-but-mythical founders. The manifolds are enabled by programmable matter and neural implants that give access to the virtual realities of "inscape," where human minds interface with AIs; software controls called "tech locks" either prevent the inhabitants of the various manifolds from physically or virtually interacting, or, conversely, under strictly controlled conditions, permit such interaction, all the while maintaining the integrity of the various Worldviews.
Some manifolds, like Westerhaven, are cosmopolitan, embracing social and technological complexity, including a self-confident curiosity about the cultures of "neighboring" manifolds, while others, like Raven, follow a more insular weltanschauung, eschewing overt technology in favor of an existence ostensibly closer to nature, not blinding themselves to the advanced technology that makes their lives possible but choosing to cast that technology and its effects in other terms.
One morning, Livia Kodaly, a young musician and singer of Westerhaven, is enticed into Raven by an adventurous older friend, Lucius Xavier, to investigate rumors of "Impossibles"—anomalies that somehow escape the censorship of the tech locks. There they witness the appearance of strangers who claim to be the mythical ancestors of Raven's people, returned bearing Impossible gifts. In the ensuing confusion, Lucius disappears, and a terrified Livia flees to Westerhaven.
It soon becomes clear that the ancestors are invaders, come to "bring your people out of their fantasy-land and back to reality." Somehow these outsiders, followers of something or someone called 3340, are able to dissolve not only manifolds but the tech locks themselves. Livia, her best friend, Aaron, and a Raven refugee named Qiingi launch themselves from the besieged coronal in an unlikely spaceship, hoping to find help. Instead, they find the Archipelago. Based on an inscape without tech locks, the Archipelago is made up of post-humans more or less like Livia, godlike beings who were once human but are no longer, powerful AIs representing the government and factions of the populace, and even more powerful AIs called anecliptics, remote and enigmatic denizens of the Lethe Nebula who may be responsible for it and the coronals floating there, including Teven Coronal.
Livia and the others are soon drawn in to the Byzantine politics of the Archipelago, where the invisible hand of the anecliptics assures a sterile peace and order. Only the Good Book, a role-playing system of subtle self-organizing potential, seems to offer humans a chance of escaping the anecliptics' benign control. But the Good Book is more than it seems, and discovery of its secret leads Livia back to Teven Coronal and an apocalyptic confrontation with 3340.