ABANDONED. Sci-Fi book predicted the Internet of Things among others

[Edward]

I have been looking for this book a few years now and Google has been no help. It was written by a woman (pretty sure), and I think she eventually went to work in the tech industry. It was not the most beautiful written book ever, but it was written, if I remember correctly, in the 90's or early 00's and predicted wearable technology that connected people to the "Net".

It is about a woman who's works as a technician of sorts on the software of these jewelry devices which connect people to the Net. When people are connected, they seem to be in some pseudo virtual reality, even as they go about their daily lives. She get's a brand new piece of jewelry which is state of the art, but it is defective and she is unable to connect.

That's when she realizes there's another world of people who's brains are incompatible with the technology. They watch people moving around like zombies and reacting to this virtual world en masse. She does a little research at a library and finds some information about a man who's researching some kind of "Super-Consciousness" (my words), but when she goes back to corroborate what she found all that information is gone.

She's able to find this man anyway. He was a friend of her mothers, if I remember correctly, who was instrumental in creating the Net. This man is developing a private "Net" of his own, with a select group of researchers and scientists who are allowed in. At one point, she has sex with him in a virtual room with Japanese style paper walls and everyone else hears it. This surprises and angers her. Pretty sure she had some other suitor in there as well.

It turns out, people are becoming similar to neurons to this "Super-Consciousness". Each individual knows as much about what the "Super-Consciousness" is doing as any one neuron. And any one person has as much control over it as any one neuron. And even though this guy-inventor escaped the Net to make his own... which wasn't supposed to form a "Super-Consciousness"... well, his network formed a "Super-Conciousness" anyway. It's kind of a side effect. In the same way that each individual neuron is dumb to it's presence in a whole, all the random connections form another type of life.

It reminded me of a "Siphonophore" (for more info, see https://www.newsweek.com/otherworldly...) which is kind of like an organism of organisms. It is made up of animals like we are made up of cells. If we are a giant "Eukaryota Colony", they are a giant "Simple Animal Colony". And this "Super-Consciousness" is a giant "Human Colony".

That was novel and mind blowing, and since reading it, I've referenced it a lot, but can't recommend the book!

The very end was less amazing: these two "Super-Consciousness" colonies go to war with each other. They try and crush out the other in some kind of "Darwinian" survival of the fittest, this-planet-ain't-big-enough-for-the-two-of-us kind of battle.

If anyone can help me find this book, I'll buy you lunch.

Thanks!

[Kris]

Edward, please post a new comment if you're still looking for this book - or if you found it.

Edward (OP) was last active on the site in May 2020. Moving to Abandoned folder.