As it transpired the Comprise cannot sustain communication with Earth over distances beyond the Moon’s orbit and their attempts to create Comprise off-shoots have failed, so the Comprise are effectively confined to Earth. The Comprise have existed in an uneasy truce with the rest of Humanity since the time they attempted to absorb them into the cyborg collective. Meanwhile, we discover that Earth has been subsumed by the Comprise, a gestalt human cyborg organism, ‘comprised’ of billions of individual human units forming a single consciousness. Rebel escapes again and again, while in the meantime undergoing personality disorders because of the battle going on in her mind between the new Rebel personality and the repressed Eucrasia. The Deutsche Nakasone Corporation want the persona back all costs while a rival bidder, fronted by an avatar called Snow, also gets in on the act. Persona bums (such as Eucrasia Walsh) are hired to test the personas before they go on the market, but in this case Eucrasia liked her persona so much that she ran off with the original copy still in control of her mind. Personas (or personae) are wetware programmes with which users can augment, supplement or overlay their personality. In ‘Vacuum Flowers’ – the title refers both to the genetically engineered blue flowers which grow in vacuum on the surface of asteroids and to the many societies which have flowered in various exotic habitats within the Solar System – the element sought is the persona of Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark. The basic pursuit scenario is either that the protagonist is in search of something or someone, the discovery of which is of vital importance to the outcome of the story, or else the protagonist is the pursued and his or her capture, or that of whatever he or she possesses, is of vital importance. If she survives.’īlurb from the 1989 Legend paperback edition. So she does what anybody sane would do – she escapes.Īnd in the sprawling, mad civilisations of the future, she’s in for a very interesting time indeed.

If she stays in the Medical Centre, she has No Future. The body she awakes in isn’t her own: her mind is unique the agency owning her is deadly. ‘Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark is hot property.

Vacuum flowers michael swanwick