Mindware Issues — John Peace

In the age of the brain-wired supernet and pocket universes, Ghamdan, a 22nd-Century P.I., must track down the only surviving witness to an ugly kidnap and murder. The terrified witness seems to have fled into a top-security prison housed in a pocket universe. He's fleeing the powerful malware that the alleged murderer can inject into a victim's mind. So Ghamdan must follow. But who can he trust?


It seems like any other day in the e-office for Private Investigator Ghamdan Shamiri. An embattled worker needs legal leverage, claiming he's been framed: that kind of ordinary. Then he's hired by Helena Szychter, poker-faced agent for a murder victim's father.

Before the morning's out he and she are hot on the trail of a man who witnessed the murder, a man so afraid of the alleged murderer that he appears to have taken on the identity of a convicted criminal so he could be transported into a supermax prison located inside an artificial branefold, a pocket universe. As the day quickly turns nasty on Ghamdan, he must decide who he can rely on, and who might be infected by the criminal's Mind Trojan software.

We discover that all is not as it seems, and Ghamdan must choose between his own safety and doing the right thing - for once.