Santa Cruz, Calif., at some point not too far from 2007 (textual clues such as a new U.S. president and a new war in Korea point to the next decade), is playing host to a strange homeless fellow named Rudi. Not quite in his right mind, Rudi is living out of the back of a mobile radio broadcast van he's stolen from his former church group, and sending his quasi-religious messages—mixed with pop music—out at low wattage to anyone who will listen. In his spare time, he works at a soup kitchen and hangs out with a homeless woman named Irene. Memories of his estranged sister Linnea, his beloved dead grandmother and an old girlfriend named Tenley all surface at intervals to perplex him. Blinding headaches and paranoid "delusions" don't help matters, either. After a near-fatal medical emergency galvanizes him, Rudi sets out to pin down his past and discover just what's missing from his memories, the seminal events that made him what he is today—not quite human.

"Meanwhile," in the San Francisco of 1937, an architect named Benjamin discovers his own cranial problems: an inoperable brain tumor calculated to give him an imminent death. Desperate for relief, Benjamin begins to patronize one Madame Grurie, a disciple of the philosopher and mystic Gurdjieff. The medium and healer has been recommended by Benjamin's partner, Zachary, whose wife Etta is a disciple. Attending Madame Grurie's workshops and seances, Benjamin begins learning about the fourth-dimensional realities behind human existence. His relationship with Etta takes on new depths. But the suspicious "normal" world of sleepwalkers is about to bring this bubble of enlightenment crashing down.

Finally, 300 years from the present, we encounter Olavo and his peers. These post-humans live in a variety of environments, both softspaces and hardspaces. The virtual-reality softspaces include any number of familiar and outre designs. The hardspaces consist of several high-tech ships like Olavo's Wings of Uriel, which are connected to the rest of civilization by "quantum links" or "qinks." But a cosmic gamma-ray burst severs these connections and corrupts the data storage that holds the personality templates of Olavo and company. Olavo seems the worst damaged, and as his peers attempt to resurrect him, he must undertake a quest through his shattered memories to discover who he really is.

Asserting the supremacy of the mind

Mark Budz's previous three novels were hard-core cyberpunk/ribofunk of the densest, most ingenious variety. This more humanistic novel finds him stretching in admirable artistic fashion. But in the end, I found it a tad less successful than its predecessors. Its aims are laudable, and the scene-by-scene execution is generally deft. But the message is a bit overfamiliar, and the components are less than exciting separately and fail to come together for too long.

The overfamiliarity stems from the notion of seemingly unconnected events really exhibiting bonds below the surface of our normal senses or ideas. Although I have not yet seen Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain (2006), I did read the graphic novel version that preceded it in 2005, and the template of that project, already somewhat overused, is exactly the one Budz employs here. It's a notion that any well-versed SF reader has encountered many times before. And Budz fails to really begin to link his three different milieus until at least halfway through the book, leaving us to enjoy or reject each one in isolation.

The Rudi scenario has a kind of Philip K. Dick/Ubik (1969) vibe about it that is mildly entertaining. The Benjamin scenario is the weakest, with very little real period ambiance. And the Olavo scenario is kind of watered-down Greg Egan. Budz meticulously arrays various symbolic motifs that connect the three, but the ultimate explanation is long in coming and not overly surprising. Also, the far-future scenario exerts a kind of teleological strange attraction on the other two, rendering them less strong because they are past and dead. In this kind of story, all three venues should have the same ontological pull.

In the end, although Budz displays great affection and compassion for the human condition, the elaborate apparatus of this book fails to add to the telling.