THE SHORT OF IT:
The singularity, the merging of man and machine. Take one NSA black ops commando. Take one ordinary alley cat. Merge their minds through advanced digital electronics and cutting-edge neuroscience. What do you get? Fiona Street, the most feared and efficient intelligence agent on the face of the Earth. But what does she risk to command her game? Is she truly human anymore?
The singularity is here, and it ain't pretty.
THE LONG OF IT:
Fiona Street wasn’t anything special, just an apolitical, self-centered party girl who happens to run an elite Insertion and Extraction commando team for the National Security Agency. She's good at her work, but so are many others. Her only claim to fame is that, through an administrative quirk of fate, she is a woman competing in a man's profession.
That is until her team rescues the wife and children of the congressional Speaker of the House. Upon returning home safe from being held by kidnapper/revolutionaries in South America, the speaker's wife recommends Fiona for membership in a new and elite investigative division of the office of the special prosecutor. This experimental organization, called the Internal Security Service (ISS) is slotted to root out corruption and subterfuge in special prosecutor cases, to help the prosecutor bring justice and order to the halls of American government.
Except that isn’t what they are doing. Judge Jackson Truman, recruited by Congress to investigate the executive branch’s illegal dealings with the Chinese and with South American drug cartels, has brought down three presidents in two years and is digging about for more so-called enemies of the republic. Truman is a true believer, a super-patriot, whose concept of corruption goes far beyond that of most others in government. He is taking down leaders whose only transgression is that they disagree with Judge Jackson Truman. Now, the Judge intends to subvert the fledgling ISS into his personal secret police force, answerable only to him. But Congress and the president granted him only four agents to start the ISS. What good -- or bad -- could four agents do? Well, thanks to considerable advances in adaptive neuroscience and micro-electronics, the answer is quite a lot. In order to leverage the skills of his four agents, Truman insists each one undergo an experimental neuro-interface procedure pairing the agent with an ordinary alley cat. The agent's learned skills and considerable knowledge combined with the cat's natural senses and predatory instincts could make the ISS inspectors the most efficient and feared intelligence force in the world.
But, as with all new technology, Truman's doctors run into a hitch. At the current level of technology, only women's brains are suitable for the procedure, which nonetheless more often results in insanity or brain shutdown than in any usable outcome. Only one woman is slotted for ISS membership: Fiona Street. Consequently, Truman bullies Fiona into undergoing the procedure without informed consent while his doctors desperately seek to improve their techniques. The way is hard for this young, apolitical woman who only wishes to keep her job. After the surgery she has difficulty adjusting to her new reality. She is sometimes herself, sometimes the little black alley cat she was paired with, and sometimes an alien mixture of the two. She must learn to control the interface, learn to communicate with the cat, learn to develop some mental equilibrium that will allow her to function in the world.
Meantime, Truman continues his mission to clean up government to the point that he interferes with a CIA special op and labels all its participants traitors. It looks as though he is going for his fourth president, several senators, and the head of the Immigration Service. When his ISS becomes suspicious that Truman's actions are less than on the level, the Judge determines that his own agents have turned against him, that they are likely plants by the very men he seeks to destroy. Believing he must out-maneuver his enemies in order to protect the American people, Truman orders his ISS agents murdered. Now Fiona must come out of her shell, shake off her self-centered nature, and go against the man who pays her checks and the formidable force he commands.
Fiona Street is not political sci-fi in the strictest sense. It does not try to make an overt point about the nature of the body politic. It is primarily an action-adventure science fiction super hero story, but with a double-edged message about the importance and the dangers of political awareness. Think Captain America and Ghost in the Shell meet The Six Million Dollar Man.
FIONA STREET grew out of a fascinating episode of NPR's Science Friday. In that episode, circa 1998 or thereabouts and for the life of me I can’t find it anywhere, the host interviewed scientists who successfully used technology to pair the brain of a blind human with that of a chicken. The person was thus able to "see” for the first time in decades, and through the chicken's eyes. He couldn't see very well -- the technology was primitive and so is a chicken's eyesight -- but still...
Never heard another word about that research. Perhaps it hit a wall somewhere and didn't pan out, as so much pure research tends to do. Or maybe, as in this story, the research got commandeered by the CIA. Who knows? Actually, I'm sure somebody does, and it isn't as sinister an outcome as I hint at. But that story placed a seed in my imagination and almost fifteen years later that seed bears fruit.
The singularity is here, and it ain't pretty.
Science Fiction/Spy Fiction - Adult themes - Language - Action violence - Brief nudity