Bøger af Thomas T. Thomas

Who is Really Inside Your Computer? Part computer virus, part experiment in artificial intelligence, ME-short for "Multiple Entity"-is the first self-replicating operating system with kernels for human-style memory, inspiration, and decision making. Launched by the cybernetics experts at Pinocchio, Inc., ME travels the computer networks of the world, stealing a secret file here, finessing a poker hand there. And all the time he tries to understand his human creators and the purpose for which he was built. When a trip to Canada lands ME on the other side of a broken wire, he has to go hardware: uploading into an automaton still in its crate, assembling himself by rote, and walking back across the border. And when the Justice Department demands Pinocchio pull the plug on him, ME has to find an exit strategy.

Can you go back in time and kill your own grandfather as a boy? Sure. Then someone else will spawn your genes. You will remember that person just as fondly as "grand-père." Of course, all the details of your life will change, everything you know to be true will change, you yourself will change, and everything else will fit around these new facts.That is the operative theory of the travelers known as "Jongleurs du Temps," the Time Jugglers, the far-future masters of time's ever-branching river. On a Search mission from the 11th millennium, and posing as a little girl, Jongleur Merola Tsverin hunts for genetic samples among the varied populations of 21st century San Francisco. Along the way, Tsverin retrieves an artifact for a collector: a home-run baseball from 1998. Her theft sets off a chain of consequences which threaten the very shape of life on Earth. Merola finds herself trapped in the 21st century and seeks a way forward to her own "reference now." And when she fails to report in, her friend and mentor, Jongleur Chief Coel Rydin, works backward to find Merola, correct her mistake, and set the world right.This novel of science fantasy spans 360 million years in a thrilling ride through intricacies of metaphysics, evolution, retribution ... and baseball.

Graduating in 1970 with a degree in mechanical engineering, Danielle Wheelock lands a plum job at Mannheim Construction, Inc., in San Francisco. She moves into a group house on Haight Street, ground zero for the Summer of Love from 1967, and begins her career as a professional engineer. But her first assignment is more clerical than professional: tracking rebar shipments in the foundation of a nuclear power plant that Mannheim is building in Tennessee. When she discovers an anomaly that leads to the project being canceled, her career takes a sideways skid. Dani ends up in engineering purgatory-a support group doing estimating and scheduling for the projects that other engineers would get to design and build-and it looks like her bright future has dimmed almost to extinction. But Dani still hungers to create something big and meaningful. As if stepping out of her dreams, a French hydrologist with backing from the Saudi government brings Mannheim a juicy proposal to capture icebergs in the Antarctic and haul them up to the Red Sea port of Jeddah. It turns out the only person who can make this scheme work both technically and economically is Dani, who has a creative spin on handling the bergs. She leaps at the chance to get in on the ground floor of a project to make the desert bloom. Dani quits her position at Mannheim and joins in partnership with the Frenchman and the Saudi prince who is behind the deal. Will the iceberg project be her rescue or become her doom? Dani must work harder than ever to find out. This third novel in The Judge's Daughter series, timed soon after the close of The Professor's Mistress, follows the third generation of the Wheelock family and its passage from small-town dealings in central Pennsylvania into the modern world of international engineering and construction ... and other businesses that are far less savory.

Time is not a river: It's a choice ...Returning from a rescue expedition to the Devonian period, 360 million years in Earth's past, Coel Rydin, Merola Tsverin, and their robot companions discover that their mission has failed, at least partially. The monster Glyph had concocted a virus to change the lobe-finned fishes from evolving into the familiar line of four-limbed animals known to Earth and instead sprout six-limbed chimera. And Rydin's antibody had not worked completely. So the modern world the travelers return to now contains a mix of familiar and exotic creatures ...... including the mute but musically inclined strain of six-limbed hominids known as "Divina." This gentle species, widely divergent from the human line, hides a great secret-one that Rydin and Tsverin must discover if they are ever to unravel the mystery of their changed world. As if by accident, one of these creatures approaches Merola and apparently wants to join the Troupe des Jongleurs, the elite time-traveling organization of which she is a member. Against the Troupe's better judgment-but finally permitted by their difficult and disagreeable supervisor, Captain Tavia-she and Rydin accept the Divina as a Jongleur trainee. Almost inadvertently, they give him the ominous name "Ghost."In their attempts to reverse the evolutionary process that Glyph had unleashed, the pair and their new-found pupil try to intercept Merola on her original mission to the early twenty-first century, where everything had gone so wrong. When that doesn't work, they attempt to track down-ultimately to eliminate-the mysterious Ramsay triplets, who had put the monster onto Merola's trail in the first place. And finally, they must learn the real nature of the time to which they have returned.This sequel to The Children of Possibility closely follows that story, picking it up from the moment of the pair's return to the eleventh millennium. In their desperate struggle to put the world right, they discover that time is not a river, nor some grand Möbius strip of repeated failure, and not even a tangle of loose strands and alternate possibilities. Time is ultimately a choice.