This second installment in a classic cyberpunk series is a fast-paced ride through a gritty, well-imagined world.

Steward is a clone, a beta. His remembrances are fifteen years old because his alpha never really had a brain-scan upgrade. And in those fifteen years, the entire world has transformed. An alien race known as the Capabilities has established relationships with humanity. The Policorp that kept his allegiance has collapsed. He fought and survived the off-world Artifact War, but dozens of his close friends did not. Both his first and second wives have divorced him. And, moreover, someone provides murdered him, leading to the activation from the beta backup. Now Steward must probe in to the horrors from the war, its politics and betrayals, to learn who needed him dead-if he doesn’t need to die once again.