The culmination of Baker’s magnificent, multivolume time-travel saga (The Children of the Company, 2005, etc.) about the ubiquitous Company.
Having discovered time travel, the owners of Dr. Zeus, a database that turns into an AI over the course of the novel, set about rearranging history to ensure their own existence—and enriching themselves by looting the past. To do their bidding, they created a race of immortal, programmed cyborgs. Now, by the 24th century, many cyborgs have ideas of their own, and they’re united only in their desire to destroy Dr. Zeus. On July 9, 2355, the Temporal Concordance—the road map by which Dr. Zeus’s owners know the future—ceases. But what replaces it? As the current owners grew increasingly desperate to evade what they suspected would be a wholesale revolt by their cyborg servants, they tinkered with producing superhumans—several times, beginning with 16th-century heretic Nicholas Harpole, then 19th-century superspy Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, finally 24th-century aristocrat Alec Checkerfield. However, the latest version of Edward knows the answers to nearly everything, including how to transcend time itself, and intends to rule the world—unless, that is, his lover, the botanist Mendoza, can persuade him otherwise. As Dr. Zeus’s owners create a planetary artificial intelligence out of the Dr. Zeus database, in the hope that the AI can defend them against the vengeful cyborgs, the huge enforcer, Budu, summons a Neanderthal army, and evil cyborgs Labienus and Aegeus plot to double-cross each other, Dr. Zeus and the entire human race.
Wise, sad, sometimes wildly funny—no Company fan will want to miss Baker’s rousing, astonishing conclusion.
