Netwalk Sequence Series

IN A TECH-DRIVEN BIOREMEDIATION FUTURE, HARD CHOICES MUST BE MADE.   Powerful mother. Powerful daughter.   Sarah Stephens and her daughter Diana Landreth run bioremediation companies dependent upon neural nets and nanotechnology to operate complex biobots.   Sometimes competitors, sometimes collaborators, while they disagree, they are still mother and daughter.   And then the Disruption Machine begins its campaign of devastation.   In the process of their collaboration to stop the Disruption Machine, the shadows in their lives force their paths into a dangerous divergence.   Sarah chooses politics and power.   Diana chooses research and family.   What happens when their choices collide?

IN A TECH-DRIVEN FAMILY, HARD CHOICES PASS TO THE NEXT GENERATION Mother against daughter. Grandmother against granddaughter.   Melanie Landreth has maintained a lonely outpost as the President of Do It Right North America for seven years. Her grandmother, Sarah Stephens, the President of the Confederated States of North America, rules the continent with an iron fist. Melanie's brother Andrew is one of Sarah's lackeys. Their mother Diana controls Do It Right outside of North America, and engages in secretive maneuvers aimed at overthrowing Sarah's reign.   Will things ever change?   When they do, who will survive?   What role does the Disruption Machine—now known as the Gizmo—play in the emergence of the new Netwalk technology? Why does the Gizmo manage to unite Sarah and Melanie's mother Diana, when they disagree on just about any other subject?   The struggle for control within this family can change the world—for better or for worse.   And Melanie wants to be the winner.

IN A TECH-DRIVEN FUTURE, ESTRANGED SIBLINGS UNITE Melanie Fielding and her brother Andrew Landreth-Stephens may not have always agreed on much over the years. But when it comes to their children, and the potential threat presented to them by the mysterious device called the Gizmo, Melanie and Andrew are in firm agreement. The Gizmo is toxic. They will not expose their teenaged children to the device's manipulations.   However. This choice means that neither Melanie nor Andrew are allowed access within the inner circles of the Corporate Courts, which manage and control the Gizmo—and the Courts, led by their mother Diana, scheme to bring their children under Gizmo's control.   Meanwhile, the Gizmo is stirring. It just takes one big mistake by Andrew's son Rick—and an error by Melanie's daughter Bess—to upset a delicate balance of fifteen years. Can Bess, working with her dead Netwalker great-grandmother Sarah and her cousin Rick, manage to thwart the aims of Gizmo, Diana, and the Corporate Courts?   What will be the price they pay for resisting Gizmo?

IN A TECH-DRIVEN FUTURE, HARD CHOICES FORCE UNEXPECTED FAMILY ALLIANCES   Sometimes happy endings don't stay that way.   Over a year after Melanie Fielding helped her mother Diana Landreth overthrow a repressive North American government headed by her grandmother Sarah Stephens, she faces even more problems.   The new Netwalk technology that allows Sarah's personality to exist after death is developing in unpredictable ways. Rogue Netwalkers emerge, allied with Diana and Melanie's long-term foe, the Freedom Army.   Worse, Melanie is forced into an alliance with her estranged brother Andrew Stephens, at the demand of the international Corporate Courts. The Courts control a mysterious entity, the Gizmo, which is somehow connected to Netwalk. As they learn more about the Courts and the Gizmo, Melanie and Andrew realize that Diana may not be trustworthy.   That the Gizmo and the Courts have a dangerous agenda that isn't what it seems—and Sarah may be their best tool to stop the Gizmo from fulfilling its goals.

An urgent summons from her daughter Bess brings Melanie to the side of her dying brother Andrew. Andrew has rejected uploading into Netwalk--but circumstances may change that decision. What choice will Andrew make...and how does it affect Melanie's infant granddaughter Kylee?

IN A TECH-DRIVEN FUTURE INVOLVING SPACE, LEARNING TO SURVIVE MATTERS   Bess Fielding has a natural affinity for life in space. But that doesn't mean that she—and her beloved, Alex Jeffreys—don't have things to learn about survival in space.   THREE STORIES.   TRANQUILITY FREERIDERS—Bess and Alex promote the notion of skiing and snowboarding on the Moon, not just for tourism, but for emergency evacuations. Will dustskiing meet the challenge when put to the test?   TOO HIGH TO FALL—Stealth technology isn't supposed to work in space. So when a mysterious roundabout suddenly appears on the screens of space station DIR 1, what's going on—and to what degree is it connected with increasing incidents of sabotage in different production laboratories on space stations and the Moon?   OF ARCHANGELS AND FUZZY GREEN MASCOTS—Tragedy strikes on space station DIR 1 when a bomb takes out a crucial production wing. As Bess and Alex investigate, they discover that the alien artifact, the Gizmo, that is supposed to be securely confined on Earth—may not be. And that discovery opens up even more concerns.

IN A TECH-DRIVEN FUTURE, CONTROL OVER A WIRELESS TECH WHICH ALLOWS THE CREATION OF DIGITAL PERSONALITY UPLOADS AFTER DEATH LEADS FOUR GENERATIONS OF POWERFUL WOMEN TO SOME HARD, DIFFICULT TRUTHS.   At first, family matriarch Sarah Stephens and her daughter Diana Landreth appear to agree on just how they're going to manage that unexplainable, destructive, city-killing device called the Gizmo. The Corporate Courts appear to be an elegant solution to the problem. No one knows the Gizmo's origins, but everyone agrees--the Gizmo must never, ever be allowed to run free again.   Or do they?   As Sarah seeks political power as North America disintegrates into chaos, Diana's path leads her down a different way. Once Sarah becomes a digital personality upload, the choice of Diana as her host seems logical in the beginning.   But Diana's daughter Melanie Fielding starts seeing problems with the acrimonious relationship of Diana and Sarah. Her alliance with Diana begins to change when she realizes that Diana will place the Corporate Courts over the well-being of Melanie's daughter Bess.   The unlikely collaboration between Melanie and her brother Andrew Landreth-Stephens becomes more critical when they agree that protecting their children from whatever schemes the Gizmo is cooking up must be their priority.   Because the Gizmo has plans of its own...which may not be good for humanity in the long run.