Silicon Sunset
by Scott T. Grusky
InfoNet Press, 1998
Trade paperback, 304 pp.
ISBN: 0-9651190-0-9
Computers/Fiction
$15.95

The year is 2077 and data pervades.  There are no plants or animals in the cities, food grows only on orbiting satellites, and sex has been forgotten.  All day long, day after day, humans process their burgeoning data via silicon-chip PIFFEN meters implanted in their brains.  A worldwide bioelectronic net called the Neural Web links the tiny meters.

But Kale Keeler—a 26 year-old, female Web reporter—has glimpsed the "ways of the old-time."  While attending a once-in-a-lifetime physical briefing with Mr. Clyde Trivers, the CEO of the Public Netgorks, she notices that Trivers is different from everyone else. He does no data processing of his own.

Most humans would be too busy with their Web-signals to give this a second thought, but Kale suffers from a "slowed metabolic rate."  So she agrees to accept Trivers' odd assignment to investigate a certain Professor Walter Morgaux at Harvard University, which has been relegated to a retrofitter center for the most feeble processors of society.

Off to Cambridge Kale goes.  Unknown to her, she is monitored by Ralph Peterson, a small-time channel boss desperate for a Netgorks promotion. Trivers has even given Ralph a special headware device to illegally enter all segments of Kale's system, not just her public data.

The more Ralph sifts her system, the more Kale deviates from her data. She even touches the skin of a male rehab student at Harvard named Greggy Panagopoulos—a violation of the sacred Third Law of the Internal.

But the terrible truth about the world doesn't get revealed until Kale does the most brazen thing of all:  She arches her back like a bird and sends a Webless signal to her reclusive grandfather, Joseph Baptista, who lives in the unprotected zone of New Mexico.  The result is pure silicon madness.