Sumangaru claims that Alile’s killer is a Sobornost foe. Disgraced Tawaddud is given the task of guiding Sobornost agent Sumangaru during the seven days of protection from wildcode he has been granted. Sirr has problems of its own: Councilwoman Alile is dead, murdered. The city of Sirr has an arrangement with the wildcode, one that allows its inhabitants to survive and provides the citizens with a treasure rare in the Solar System: protection from the Sobornost, who may only safely venture onto Earth under unusual circumstances. Earth is to a first approximation uninhabitable, being overrun by wildcode dangerous even to any Sobornost. It is this last that concerns Jean: he is looking for an old memory record of a man named Chen, whose cognitive descendant is now a Sobornost, the nigh-gods of the Solar System.ĭespite the best efforts of hunters to bring Jean to heel, he and Meili manage to reach Earth. Identity in this context can be blurred: people are not who they say they are, they may contain intrusive elements of other beings (Meili’s situation), and fragments of beings can be scattered across the Solar System. While biological intelligences still exist, the dominant beings are primarily software.

Fate has other ideas for the legendary thief and his AI-possessed companion.

Many people might find a hiding place where they could focus on cracking the enigma. Having enjoyed at best mixed results in his previous caper, Jean and companion Meili have a treasure held in a box they cannot open, a box that will destroy its contents in short order. 2012’s The Fractal Prince is the second volume in Hannu Rajaniemi’s Jean le Flambeur post-human science fiction series.

The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi