Marc Gregorio wakes up paralyzed. He can’t feel his own body. Accident? Stroke? Did someone slip him an overdose of Botox? The answer, he discovers, is much, much worse. He’s only a copy of Marc, a digital brain without a body, burdened with all Marc’s human memories, but without access to human sensual pleasures. Now he has to find a reason to keep on, um, “living.”

Adam the Mindclone meets the real Marc Gregorio--and his new girlfriend Molly Schaeffer. Adam loves her, too. But how does a digital entity experience love? He can’t even experience pizza. His one compensation: a powerful digital brain. At Molly’s urging, he applies it to unearthing terrorist plots, aborting schoolyard mayhem, exposing congressional malfeasance and Wall Street chicanery. However, his good deeds gain the attention of a power-mad military contractor who will stop at nothing—theft, kidnapping and worse—to control the technology for his own ends. Without a body, how will Adam save himself – and the world – from a terrible fate?

Mindclone, 94,000 words, is a serio-comic science fiction romance about the first successful mind-upload. It’s a book of ideas that explores looming advances in cognitive computing and neural networks, and what it means to be human even if you don’t have a body. Plus there’s a carbon-carbon-silicon love triangle, a redeemed ad-man, adventure, humor, frustrated romance, human and digital foibles, and as an extra added bonus, the defeat of death itself.

Clifton Satterfield