n the year 2069, teleportation has become the preferred mode of travel, thanks to the technology known as d-mat. The process involves three steps: analysis on the sending end, transmission in the middle and synthesis on the receiving end. It's this tripartite nature of matter transmission that opens up the technology to a host of dangerous corollaries.
For whatever is transmitted can be recorded and subject to a second or third or fourth synthesis. Whatever is recorded can be altered. And whatever is recorded can be stolen.
In other words, these handy matter transmitters are really "anything boxes," capable of infinite abuse. As our hero, Jonah McEwan, is about to find out. But first Jonah has to get up to speed. You see, he's been in literal hibernation for three years, ever since his genius inventor father, Lindsay Carlaw, was murdered. Jonah seemed on the point of discovering his father's murderer when certain of Jonah's memories were wiped and he was dumped into a stasis bath. In the three years he was missing, a serial killer known as the Twinmaker has emerged, a lunatic who keeps illegally copying and slaughtering women who resemble Jonah's ex-lover, Marilyn Blaylock.
Roused from his long sleep, Jonah is enfeebled. But a quick pass through the d-mat for a little d-med has him up and about in no time. Then he's on the trail of the serial killer, who, weirdly and shockingly enough, just might be Jonah himself—or rather a d-mat copy gone berserk. Aided by a standoffish, suspicious Marilyn, who has joined the MIU, the cops of the Matter-transferance Investigative Unit, McEwan finds his investigations taking him to both high and low places in this startling future—and even into the cyber-mind of QUALIA, an AI partially invented by Lindsay Carlaw, and which now runs the d-mat network. Abducted by an anti-d-mat organization known as WHOLE, killed more than once and resurrected, with no allies except a leery ex-girlfriend, Jonah McEwan is like a cat using up his nine lives one by one, hoping to bring the killer down before he hits his last incarnation.
Tug-of-war of tangled lifelines
The trope of matter transmission is a venerable and hoary one in SF. Yet, while it's often used for window dressing or a handy ship-to-ground jump start, a la Star Trek, its ramifications are seldom fully plumbed. That's because they can be head-hurtingly complex, if done right. A few authors have attempted to swim at these depths. Damon Knight, with his A for Anything (1959), and Algis Budrys, with his Rogue Moon (1960). And of course, when it comes to charting the sociological implications of such a technology, rather than the metaphysical ones, we look first of all to Alfred Bester with his "jaunting," and then to Lary Niven and his "flash crowd" riffs. (As well, Bester pioneered the blend of mystery novel and SF that Williams here employs quite adeptly.)
In any case, Williams honors these illustrious predecessors by his ingenuity and hard work. His book is in fact the first truly rigorous and envelope-pushing attempt in a long time to deal with this trope. Not only is Williams meticulous in teasing out all the implications of such a device, but he embeds his tale in a future world that's truly different from ours, yet a rational extension of many current-day trends (such as the growing tug-of-war between privacy and full-disclosure demands).
Williams chooses a wise course, in that he focuses on his future at a time when the omnipotent powers of the d-mat are still under legal restraint, and just being fully understood. Had he selected a time and place where everyone and his dog could be resurrected, much of the suspense and mystery of the novel would have been undercut. As it stands now, we get to experience the shock of the new at the same time the characters do.
Williams creates good personalities for his cast, making the failed love affair between Jonah and Marilyn quite credible and sharp-edged. His villains and bureaucrats all ring true as well. These folk go through the machinations of the highly complex plot in believable fashion. Although employing the ancient device of having all the suspects gather in a room for the denouement is a tad cliched. Additionally, at this length the book feels just a hair too long, as if perhaps a 20 percent reduction in pages wouldn't have hurt at all.
Nonetheless, for sheer speculative bravado and tale-telling power, this novel ranks high not just among the subset of matter-transmitter stories, but among recent SF in general.
