Stealing Worlds
Is this a game? Or a new reality?
Sura's latest Mcjob has fallen through. She’s got no money, few friends, and a mountain of debt. Then she hears that her estranged father has been murdered somewhere in the jungles of eastern Peru--and apparently, the killers are coming for her next.
Suddenly on the run, trying to ease into a fake identity that her dad made for her years ago (“just in case”), Sura learns that disappearing in the mid-21st century surveillance state that is America is almost impossible. Then she meets a girl named Compass...
The Rewilding of Sura Neelin
Stealing Worlds is what cyberpunk might be if it were set right now, in the real world of down-at-heel strip malls, fast food outlets, vandalized bus shelters, and only so-so AI. There are self-driving vehicles, but nobody can afford to buy a car anymore. People have augmented reality glasses, but they're just one more channel for advertisers to paste billboards over everything you look at. In this world of crumbling parkades, abandoned shopping plazas, and ever-present security drones, Sura discovers an alternative--a virtual world laid over the real one, where people invent new societies and new economies at will, and where community is no longer a dirty word. Reinventing herself as Countess Vesta, scion of an imaginary family from an imaginary Europe in the steampunk AR game Rivet Couture, Sura walks off the Earth and into Wonderland.
Countess Vesta has a problem, though: someone is still hunting Sura Neelin. And so Sura will ultimately have to find a way to live in two worlds--crumbling, decadent America, and the vibrant Frames--all while solving her father's murder... and preventing her own.