Robert Gu is a world-renowned poet and recovering Alzheimer's patient. The world that he remembers was much as we know it today. Now, as he regains his faculties through a new cure, he discovers that the world has changed. He is seventy-five years old, though by a medical miracle he looks much younger, and he's starting over, for the first time unsure of his poetic gifts. Living with his son's family, he has no choice but to learn how to cope with a new information age in which the virtual and the real are a seamless continuum. But the consensus reality of the digital world is available only if, like his thirteen-year-old granddaughter Miri, you know how to wear your wireless access and to see the digital context—through smart contact lenses.
With knowledge comes risk. When Robert begins to re-train at Fairmont High he unwittingly becomes part of a wide-ranging conspiracy to use technology as a tool for world domination. This conspiracy is something that baffles even the most sophisticated security analysts, including Robert's son and daughter-in law, two top people in the U.S. military. And even Miri, in her attempts to protect her grandfather, may be entangled in the plot . . .
'In the grand tradition of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge just turned the future upside-down in Rainbow's End' Charles Stross