WELCOME TO HELL CITY, MARS
Jimmy Martin has a sore head.
He's used to smuggling illegal data in his headspace. But this is the first time it has started talking to him.
The data claims to be a distinguished academic, author and civil rights activist.
It also claims to be a bear.
A bear named Honey.
Jimmy has nothing against bioforms – he's one himself, albeit one engineered out of human stock – and works with them everyday in Hell City, building the future, staking mankind's claim to a new world: Mars.
The problem is that humanity isn't the only entity with designs on the Red Planet. Out in the airless desert there is another presence. A novel intelligence, elusive, unknowable and potentially lethal.
And Honey is here to make contact with it, whether Jimmy likes it or not.