JOURNEY INTO THE DARK HEART OF THE MACHINE--AND TO THE FARTHEST REACHES OF THE GALAXY...
TWO HOSPITAL BEDS in a Stanford University lab. Two still figures, attached by bundles of cables to the experimental QARMA supercomputer. Analise and Wolfe are true scientific pioneers, the first humans to ever leave the shells of their physical bodies to explore an entirely new virtual universe beyond time and space. But their creation, the most vivid VR metaverse ever envisioned, has come under attack.
ON A CROWDED MANHATTAN STREET, a young woman materializes within a pillar of fire. Does the arrival of this mysterious stranger correspond to the unprecedented swarm of sunspots that has turned noontime to twilight, or the auroras that ripple across daytime skies, or the regular micro-tremors that ring the Earth's crust like a church bell?
IN A SUBURBAN CALIFORNIA BASEMENT, fifteen-year-old Fiona Martinez is playing an online video game. The phone rings. A stranger is calling. “Please don’t hang up,” the man pleads. “You’re about to be approached by a character in your game. She’s hurt. You must keep her safe, at all costs. Do you understand? Help her, or she’ll die. Help her, or we’ll all die.”
...
GRONE is a fast-paced adventure set in a world where the ambitious experiments of a game developer, a neuroscientist and a physicist have created a virtual universe more real than our own, but in the process may have aroused a vast and unimaginably powerful cosmological force that jealously guards the powers of creation.
