Dervish is Digital
Pat cadigan
230 pages
published in 2000
This is the second book in the series started with Tea from an Empty Cup. Like the earlier book, Dervish is Digital is a cyberpunk police procedural, if that makes any sense.
Detective lieutenant doré Konstantin, who also starred in Tea from an Empty Cup is now in charge of the Technocrime, Artificial Reality unit of he police force she works for (it is never made clear which police force that is). In fact, she is the unit, apart from her two permanently on loan to auto-theft subordinates. Konstantin spents most of her days going into AR investigating software theft and complaints from citizens.
One such complaint comes from Susannah Ell, who is convinced her ex-husband Hastings Dervish, is stalking her. She is also convinced he has been taken over by an Artificial Intelligence. In other words: Dervish is Digital. Konstantin's investigations into this claim dovetail with her investigations into lowdown Hong Kong, an AR dictatorship accused of brainwashing people. Needless to say, things get worse.
What I like about Konstantin is her weariness and impatience with AR posturing, the mindgames people play online even now. She's about the only person in the book who doesn't not confuse AR with reality; everybody else is dismissive of the "ground floro" as they call it and looking for the big way out. Which of course is what Dervish had supposedly done; turned digital completely.
Like the previous book, this is a far denser novel than its relative short length and a the plot outline indicate. This is not fluff or light entertainment, but a novel you have to keep focused on if you want to understand what's happening. At times I wast lost, especially since I was reading it in little chunks on the way to and from work, which is not conductive for really focused reading... It may also be that the book itself is at fault; writing about AR sometimes brings out the worst in writers, confusing metaphor with reality, making it unclear what exactly is happening and how "real" it all is.