The colony known as Leviathan swims through the black sea of space, plowing through the silence above Earth with tens of millions of souls swallowed inside its rotating, cylindrical belly.

 

          Rising out of its steel guts is the urban sprawl of a new kind of civilization. Its ubiquitous information network weaves invisible threads through flesh and metal, connecting man and machine into one clamoring entity.

 

          Thoughts and memories now flow between carbon bodies as rapidly and vacantly as they do in the gray matter of just one…

 

 

          PROLOGUE

 

              

          Electric eyes smile in the night.

          Skyscraping mannequins flirt from neon-gilded towers, seducing the streets with a loop of ineffable, if commercial, ecstasies. Heavy rain bleeds color down their two-dimensional cheeks, betraying their simulated flawlessness as hysterical; impossibly beautiful faces curled in silent mockery of a city drowning in information below.

          Huddled in the miserable lower depths are their creators, shivering in the rain, blinded by the glittering excess of their own creation. Humanity forges through the artificially lit darkness overstimulated, underwhelmed and oblivious to the secret hidden around them.

          Trapped in every crack and pothole, clotting with liquid glass like wounds ripped into the fabric of reality itself, are the enigmatic reflections of Leviathan City. This mirror dimension of deformed symmetries, melting colors and phantom silhouettes captures so many lives that don't really exist moving through a plane of space that isn't really there. Any weeping shape in the night might just be a shadow of a shadow, harbinger of a now inescapable truth: there is no distinguishing between the real and the virtual anymore.

          From the throat of this deteriorated reality shrieks a mechanized voice as another life is lost on the streets of the Leviathan. Holographic alerts stamp the sky itself, flashing in every human language above the dense crowds. No one is looking, however. Each string of text is just one more burning light in the night. One more stain in the wet concrete.

          The howling sirens scarcely cease long enough to identify the next crime scene from the last. Instead, they endlessly echo between the steel, just more white noise in the flux, so as the next convoy of emergency vehicles races through the night, numbed crowds merely shuffle down cramped sidewalks with heads bowed.

          From this sea of disillusionment falls a holo-newspaper, trampled beneath the city as digital ink materializes the headline now breaking all over the city:

 

MISSING STUDENT FOUND MURDERED!

THE RAINMAN'S KILLING SPREE CONTINUES!