FREE -- US & UK Kindle Edition -- Everywhere But No Place by Mark Foster

It is the year 2042. Prisons all over the European Union are bursting at the seams. Hans Schleiman, a criminal psychologist, has developed a new system for rehabilitating prisoners. He proposes that they be housed in virtual reality units where they will spend the whole of their sentence. Schleiman has developed software that aids the Subject’s rehabilitation and he has built a new breed of supercomputer to oversee the process - the Hosts. The UK is the first country to try the scheme and Denver is one of the first of a hundred Subjects to be inserted into the Schleiman Tanks after getting mixed up in an armed robbery he’d never wanted to be involved in. His pleas of self-defence are ignored and he is sentenced to twenty-five years in the Schleiman Tank.

So it is that Denver wakes up in a lush, green World — alone, and with no idea where he is or what this World might hold.

Elsewhere, on the outskirts of Glasgow City State, Haze, a data hacker, wakes up in the bowels of a run-down estate. He is blind and destitute after choices he made five years before left him eyeless and on the run from the most dangerous men in the country. That morning the very men he has been evading finally catch up with him and take him by helicopter to London. There he meets his ex-boss, Shaun Darling. Expecting to die, Haze is told instead that he is required for one last job. Darling gives Haze an ultimatum — he either carries out this one last job, for which he will have his eyes restored as payment, or he will be killed.

Haze has no choice but to accept. He is told that Denver stole some priceless data while on the armed robbery. That data was hidden somewhere in London and it contains records of Darling's illegal activities. Darling needs it back before it falls into the wrong hands but no-one can speak with Denver because he has been inserted into a Schleiman Tank. It is Haze’s task to break into the virtual World that Denver inhabits and retrieve the location of the disks.

What no-one could prepare for is the very nature of the Host itself, a creature so advanced that not even the people who created it know what they are dealing with.

Thrust together, Denver and Haze attempt the impossible, to steal Denver’s memories from a machine so advanced, so strange, that its very mind is a nightmare. So it is that Haze’s one last job suddenly turns into a fight for survival.

Neither of them can guess what will finally happen when they confront the Host at the heart of its mind, where reality ceases to exist.

It is everywhere but no place . . .


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