You can rent your head out: go trans with a bit of hardware, invite an anonymous Watcher to step in and experience you: what you think, what you feel, what you see. Or you can go wired, enter the Deep, become a player rather than a played. Influence the consciousness you enter: touch it, flow it. Change it maybe. The Deep itself is dark: it has no form, you can't compile it. But something is changing there: something to do with I. What is I made of? Some body mods, rerouted wiring, a bit of software? Does it solve a mind/body problem? Does it have a soul? Whatever I is, it's not obsolete. When you look at it closely, though, it's a bit alarming to find that you can see it in the mirror, just a flicker of someone who is looking back at you.

In the Deep, Self may be disappearing. Part of the point, perhaps. But what's an I, after all? C is a Watcher with an unusual profile and more entanglements than usual: but isn't identity not supposed to matter? Max wants to claim it, as he claims the Deep. Adrien takes the hardware out, to disengage. Tomaj in some sense enjoys being overwritten. Sabina is a composer, who wants only to experience I, to use it, as a vehicle to composition. But I's not friendly, maybe. You could lose your head. Some do. User, beware.

This is a very interesting book. You can read it as a futurist mystery, as a straight cyberpunk story, as a social dystopia study, as a portrait of post-technological self-actualization, as an existential question. And it works, too, on all those levels. The point of view - third-personhood, and first, and who belongs to which - is nicely written.

But also, it's a study of creative energy: how strong it is, how ruthless. It overwrites its own parameters. It operates as a series of slow reveals. In the struggle between ego and id and superego, we see what it's willing to cede to the I and to the Other, and where instead it stands its ground, and what that means for the boundaries of Self along the way. There's a very interesting inversion of creative impulses that takes place near the end, too, changing the outcome. That level of the story also works, and is worth thinking about. ( )