Conflict

Recruitment by abduction, surveillance by subscription: the war between old money and the new networks is done being cold.

A physicist vanishes from Bristol, bundled into a van by professionals who insist, accurately, that they are offering him a better job. He is not the first scientist recruited this way. Somewhere offshore, someone is assembling a research programme, and they aren't publishing.

The other side sells oppression as a service—surveillance piped to whichever government pays. Raids on the distributed underground are up eighteen hundred percent year on year, and people have started dying in carparks. In Kuala Lumpur, a manufactured celebrity performs for hundreds of millions—a distraction engine she is beginning to see from the inside. And on a smallholding in the Caliphate, two brothers run a covert fabrication cell for a network that officially doesn't exist, printing the future one grey-market batch at a time.

Both sides believe they are defending civilisation. Both are stockpiling things that should not exist.

All that's missing is the spark.

The third book of Singularity's Children: the undeclared war declares itself.