Spin State by Chris Moriarty (2003, Paperback)

**Extreme Summary**

Well written cyberpunk. A gritty, rough, plausible future where everything is possible but nothing is secure.


**Longer Review (Some spoiler Warning)**

A jagged chunk out of the life of Catherine Li, UN peacekeeper. She is a starship trooper, wired, upgraded, overclocked, heavily enhanced. And like everyone else, she is disposable. This is a future where humanity comes in flavors, original, augmented, enhanced, modified, post. Artifical intelligences roam in the background. Vast unknowable presences that relate to humans much as you would relate to a squirrel monkey. You can't really understand an AI. You just don't have the capacity. They are capable of jacking in to a suitably wired person with no more trouble than you would have putting on a pair of gloves to do some chores.

Major Li has a problem. She goes where she is ordered. This involves being frozen down and shipped from one star system to another as assigned. This process is damaging, particularly to the memory. The standard solution to this is an implant, a hard backup memory to augment the soft human one. However, the corps inspects and edits the hard memory after every assignment. You lose the parts they don't want you to have. Little by little, everything that she is, that she every was, is being whittled away.

Unfortunately, in her society this is considered a personal problem, and this is the very least of the problems confronting her...