Tea From An Empty Cup

You'd think that Artificial Reality couldn't kill you, since legally speaking, everything is a lie in AR anyway. But that seems to be just exactly what happened - in a sealed booth. And he died the same way in the real world as he did in AR - a slashed throat. Dore Konstantin is a hard-boiled cop who must now find the murderer responsible for doing the impossible - killing from inside AR, and to do so she must enter the brutal, sadomasochistic and sexually perverse world of AR. Yuki is looking for her lover, who may be dead, and who was one of Joyz Boyz - and when she meets Joy Flower she is taken on as her personal assistant. Neither Yuki nor Dore are aware of how deadly the danger that surrounds them, or of how dark the world into which they have stepped. And of course it is much more complicated than just a few impossible murders. Japan is gone - the catastrophe that took it undefined. In fact it seems the entire generation that remembers it is also gone. The world - the real world - that Pat envisions here is overcrowded and dreary, and the Artificial Reality is bright and popular. People live there as much as they can because the alternative is, well, dreary, and overcrowded. Also one is legally entitled to do whatever the hell it you feel like in AR, including murder, rape, whatever, because it is not real, and cannot affect your life. So die tonight, and come back tomorrow night rarin' to go. And then the ills of AR start to spill over into the real world. There are some very disturbing echoes of our world today in this work. I mean if we look at how many people spend their every spare moment on the internet... Gritty, fun, disturbing, thought provoking - well worth the money you'll spend on it.