The Amazon wasn't somewhere – it was somewhere-ness. A throbbing, sentient mass of green and thunderous sound that hemmed in on all sides, wet and ancient. From the cockpit of his VTOL plane, Adrian watched the leaf sea tear apart beneath him, opening to reveal the clearing. It was a jagged brown wound in the jungle, five square miles of land that had been negotiated for with an arcane mixture of international pressure, astronomical sums of money paid to the sovereign nation, and promises of ecological restoration that would leave the land in a healthier state than when they began. It was the one location that had the necessary water table, sunlight, and relative isolation for what they were soon to attempt.The Aethelstan floated anchored in the Atlantic, a floating command center. Here on shore was the front line.Adrian stepped out into the sweltering heat, the air thick with the scent of wet earth and flowers. The noise was a tactile experience—the screams of howler monkeys, the h

The fun did not last at New Eden. The old world did not begin with armies; it began with spreadsheets. It was a stealth attack, bureaucratic and totally ruthless.It began with the shipping manifests. An export of rare earths vital to Vance's quantum processing units, en route from a Kazakhstani mine to a Brazilian port, was suddenly "re-routed due to logistical recalculations." Then, a fleet of cargo ships carrying the custom polymers for Ibrahim's solar spires was quarantined by a Panamanian port authority, owing to "potential biohazard contaminants." The orders, found by Adrian's logistics division, were traceable back to a web of shell companies owned by OmniCorp Global.The blockade was not one wall, but a thousand little, legalistic barricades overnight. International shipping cartels, whose boards were supported by giant investment houses with interests in the petrochemical and drug trade, simply refused to accept contracts with any firm or group connected with the Helios Proje

The blockade had failed to strangle New Eden, but it had managed to make it the most famous place on earth. The corporate blockade, intended to starve the city into nonexistence, had instead spectacularly backfired. It created a classic David and Goliath narrative, and the world, hungry for hope and heroes, devoured it.It started with Maya's raw, unedited footage. She was no longer a traditional journalist; she was a documentarian. Her shots of the robotic constructors weaving buildings like metal spiders, the food pavilion nourishing hungry families with smiles, and most movingly, the barefoot children running along the glowing streets, were cut into a documentary that bypassed traditional networks. It was uploaded directly onto the global net, free for the world to see.They called it "Eden: The First Week." It went viral. It was viewed a billion times in hours. In a day, it was all anyone was discussing. There was no narrator to the documentary; it didn't need one. The images wer

The glow of the First Light Festival was still in the city's minds when the counterstrike hit. The corporate cartel, the OmniCorp Nexus, had watched with cold, calculating eyes. They had seen the unbreakable optimism on the faces of two million people, and they understood that a siege of mere deprivation would not be effective. New Eden was a self-contained ecosystem now. To annihilate it, they would have to shock its heart and poison its roots.The first cut was physical, violent, and deniable.An armada of unmanned barges, with the last, crucial cargo of germanium-arsenide substrates for Vance's quantum network upgrade, was traveling along a tributary two hundred miles from New Eden. They were answering with no Helios flag present; they were going in under the guise of a neutral Swiss shipping firm. It did not matter. Far out into the darkness of night, the lead barge simply. vanished. No missile reading, no attack craft on radar. Shore witnesses would report a silent, pinpoint flas

The System's red alert was a brand burned into Adrian's brain. Neutralize. The command was a cold, hard imperative. But you can't neutralize a specter in your own machine. Riley hadn't pilfered intel; he'd become a phantom limb of their operation, one that betrayed them whenever it felt like it.The search was a quiet, desperate probing in the virtual bowels of New Eden. Voss and Vance worked in a tense, unspoken partnership, their past hatred submerged under the burden of the magnitude of the threat. They tore the code of the city apart, line by line, module by module. They ran diagnostics on the AI central that managed everything from power distribution to garbage recycling—the neural core of their utopia.They looked for forty-eight hours and discovered nothing. The systems were immaculate. The logs were pristine. It was the silence of a perfect crime.It was Vance, with his quantum-thinking eye, who at last thought it could be more than a foreign body, but a stained soul. "The pre