Agnosis is a cyberpunk-ish techno thriller set in the distant future. John Dorian and Amara Cain are tech employees of the Masonic Archive Infocache, a personality/personal data digital archive. While tracking and eliminating a data spider that has infiltrated the Infocache, Dorian, the resident IT dork and erstwhile systems hacker, unwittingly uncovers a galaxy-spanning conspiracy to enslave all of humanity to a semi-divine alien race.
Assisted only by the virtual avatar of their nemesis, John and Amara spiral from universe to dataverse, race against time and the overpowering foes to unravel the secret obsession of the most renowned technological pioneer in human history.
Excerpt:
The spider was fat.
As all hoary predators, it was alternately brazen and sly, cagey and belligerent, compensating with guile what it had lost in to age and the ravages of time. Into a meticulously rendered universe of milky matrices and opalescent geometry, Dorian fluttered after it, tickling skeins, tugging at anchors, freefalling through the immeasurable vastness of a cerulean space. His palms were damp, his fingers trembled. The spider might have been bloated and limping along on legs so old and cockeye hacked that the compilers couldn’t even decipher its business anymore, but it was wise, and if it suspected for even a moment that he was stringing it along, it would scurry away into one of its endless black warrens of binary detritus where he might never see it again. Dorian was savvy to all the latest tricks, but the spider was the master of this environment. It had likely been feeding on the network a dozen years before he had assembled his first Vorman-perl script.
That was what he believed, at least, that the spider was ancient, an unearthed artifact, splendid in its antiquity. And crafty. Ever so crafty to have survived undetected for so long. So he had come after it with guile of his own. He’d been laying his traps for almost two weeks, off and on, salting packets of bait along the back alleys of the data structure, each bundle of code a lexicon of chaos text that was more noise than signal, but noise pregnant with its own nefarious structure. Tasty bits like the pixellated approximation of a skittering housefly. He taught himself what the spider liked, what it ignored, what it processed and what it left behind once the gorging was done. Then he built his own database of its tastes, and refined his applications to suit the particular interests of his target. He watched and waited, measured the spider’s strikes in picoseconds and studied the web vibrations as it dragged its soft and pale underbelly along the dynamic datascape.
And all the time, he scuttled along surreptitiously behind the beast and plugged the holes it had chewed in the fabric of the network. He learned many of its favorite paths and its trapdoor escape routes. He buried his sensors and dug his holes, lined the walls of data-dense caverns with pungi sticks of Escher algorithms and Moebius logic.