Dimensions
106 x 191 x 25mm
Nat Idle, a former med student turned freelancewriter, stands on a desolate subway platform in San Francisco, waiting for thenight's last train. Suddenly, a burly man appears from the subway tunnel and falls into Nat, hurtling him to the ground.His head smacks pavement, a vicious impact, enough to cause a severe concussion. Nat rises, brushes himself off, and discovers two things: that an intriguing brunette has come to his aid -- and there is clear and surprising evidence this attack was no accident.
It is the beginning of a mystery that Nat finds himself forced to unravel, and one that is all the more confounding given the damage Nat's brain has suffered.
He follows leads from the gritty neighborhood where he works (in an office above a sex shop) to Chinatown, into a juvenile detention center and the heart of Silicon Valley and, ultimately, into the cloud.
The world's data is kept in the cloud. It is our virtual foot locker, the place where we keep our secrets and our dreams. And Nat discovers that something very dangerous is happening in the cloud, or, rather, because of it.
Nat's investigation leads him to discover the tragic death a decade earlier of an 11-year-old local girl. She had walked into a street and was hit and killed by a car. That too, was no accident. Nat discovers that other children in the area have begun suffering unusual neurological problems. And the troubles seem to be coinciding with the emergence of the cloud. Could all the data swirling around the world - and our efforts to keep track of it all, to juggle the information-- be doing something to their brains?
Nat's discoveries take on very personal meaning. He is sadly estranged from his newborn son and strong-willed girlfriend. He is in a serious funk - his own cloud - a fragile state of one that, as our story unfolds, begins to parallel the state of mind of the children whose neurological troubles he has come to investigate.
All the while, Nat has no idea who to trust. He finds himself surrounded by a cast of unreliable characters: a Silicon Valley scion, a strong-arm tough from Chinatown, a comically narcissistic former reality-TV star and, above all, the beguiling brunette he first met at the subway station. Her name is Faith. She holds all the promise and risks of faith itself.
THE CLOUD is a fast-paced, engrossing thriller that explores the way our dependence on technology is changing us and our brains. The revelations are delivered through powerful and surprising twists right up to the book's final pages. The revelations hearken to questions raised by Orwell and Huxley about how we can become imprisoned not just by authoritarian and corporate powers in the modern world but by our own weaknesses and cravings for thrills and entertainment.
And, finally, the story becomes a personal revelation for Nat. Only in the last few pages of THE CLOUD will Nat discover what has really been happening to him - his own brain and his own emotions -- as he discovers a mystery as powerful as what he discovers about the cloud.
