QUASAR by Jamil Nasir © 1995

MEET THE PATIENT

     Wires ran from her tangled raven-black hair. They were attached to a console with a single flashing red light. The console was cheap, crude, the kind you could find in sleazy 'dromes and bars all over the City, the kind that damaged as many brain functions as it enhanced. Karmade cursed. He stepped close to her, heart pounding, Quasar Zant He peeled up her eyelid. There was nothing but white; her iris was rolled all the way up into her head. Agitated, he looked at the transducer readouts. The level and scope of stimulation was incredible; almost every part of her brain was entrained in a jagged wave form he had never seen before, at 75 millivolts. The stimulation chronograph stood at 20.33 hours. Maximum safe stimulation time for hypothalamic transducers was about four hours. Panic blared in him. He gave Quasar Zant a quick examination with sweat-slick hands. Her skin was cold, grayish, her pulse and breathing barely detectable. She might already be dead, he realized, the pounding rhythms of the transducer keeping up a counterfeit of life as they rammed through her brain.

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     Ted Karmade is a psychiatric technician with a shaky future, one of millions of faceless inhabitants of the City, a vast artificial environment that is mankind's last bastion on a biologically ravaged Earth. Inexplicably hired to care for Quasar Zant, psychotic young heiress of the City's richest familycorp, he is catapulted into a dizzying and dangerous world of absolute power and insatiable ambition, sleep comfort and depraved bloodlust, deadly secrets and terrifying illusions. To survive he must journey to the depths of Quasar's soul, face torture and madness, then descend into an even more nightmarish landscape the City's underground Warrens, where mutants live in forced exile. There he must decide if he will follow Quasar's fever-dream reality and whether it will lead to destruction or renewal for the entire human race.