Enter. Or turn back. This is Erebos.
An intelligent computer game with a disturbing agenda. When 16-year-old Nick receives a package containing the mysterious computer game Erebos, he wonders if it will explain the behavior of his classmates, who have been secretive lately. Players of the game must obey strict rules: always play alone, never talk about the game, and never tell anyone your nickname. Curious, Nick joins the game and quickly becomes addicted. But Erebos knows a lot about the players and begins to manipulate their lives.
When it sends Nick on a deadly assignment, he refuses and is banished from the game. Now unable to play, Nick turns to a friend for help in finding out who controls the game. The two set off on a dangerous mission in which the border between reality and the virtual world begins to blur.
This utterly convincing and suspenseful thriller originated in Germany, where it has become a runaway bestseller.
By the end of the 30th century, humanity has the capability to travel the universe, to journey beyond Earth and beyond the confines of the vulnerable human frame.
The descendants of centuries of scientific, cultural, and physical development divide into three groups: fleshers — true Homo sapiens; Gleisner robots — embodying human minds within machines that interact with the physical world; and polises — supercomputers teeming with intelligent software, containing the direct copies of billions of human personalities now existing only in the virtual reality of the polis.
Diaspora is the story of Yatima — a polis being created from random mutations of the Konishi polis base mind seed — and of humankind. An astrophysical accident spurs the thousandfold cloning of the polises, leading to the discovery of an alien race and a kink in time that ensures humanity — in whatever form it takes — will never again be threatened by acts of God.