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| Auteur | Sagan, Nick |
| Titel | Idlewild |
| Uitgever | Bantam |
| Genre | SF / Fantasy |
| Reeksnummer | |
| Editie | pocket - 2004 - 375 p. |
| ISBN nummer | 9780553815979 |
| Taal |  |
| Conditie |  
Als nieuw |
| Beschrijving staat | (F) |
| Gewicht | 195 gram |
| Past door brievenbus (Ja/Nee) | Ja |
| Prijs | € 4,50 |
| Omschrijving | Essef - It is the late 21st century and a deadly virus has seeped into humankind's genetic make-up. In only a few generations this plague will have wiped us off the face of the planet, but we're not going down without a fight. Teams of scientists, geneticists and programmers race to find a cure, but time is not on our side. Our only hope lis in one last, desperate gamble...
The story told in the interludes is set in the middle of the 21st century. Here, a retrovirus called Black Ep has rendered all of humanity infertile. It went undetected by hiding in the human genome itself. Humanity, realising that the end of the world is imminent, promptly unites in a show of universal brotherhood. However, in the lab of a major German-American genetic research facility, a group of scientists (referred to throughout the interludes as The Southern Gentleman, Blue, and Halfway Jim) are working on a project which may just save humanity. The project involves childraising in virtual reality. To test the efficiency of the software, Halfway Jim creates a program designed to mimic the responses of a real child. Out of sentimentality, Jim's dying act is to integrate this program, who he names Malachi, into the program.
The second location is an IVR (Immersive Virtual Reality) medical academy in Idlewild, Michigan, at some time in the late 21st century. The main character of the book, a young man named Halloween, wakes up with no memory. As the book progresses, we discover that Lazarus (another student of the academy) is dead. Halloween meets the rest of the students and tries to find the culprit.
Of the students, most of the ones we meet are named for holy people, and are using pseudonyms (for example, Halloween's real name is Gabriel, and his friends' real names are given as Lazarus, Isaac, Vashti and Adam). Halloween suspects that he may have killed Lazarus, so he does not confide in anyone. He spends some time with his friend Mercutio, who is fascinated with the story of the Taj Mahal (after its builder became king, he killed all his male relatives). He sees a black-and-white boy in his dreams.
At a party, Mercutio breaks the rules, which brings the governor program, an entity known as Maestro, to the scene. Using a prepared code, Mercutio breaks the system. With information gathered in the course of his murder investigation, Halloween is able to get out of the broken system, to what he assumes will be the Idlewild IVR Medical Academy in Michigan... |
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