Headlong - Simon Ings

The Moon has been taken over by the artificial intelligences that once worked for the benefit of human colonists. This is the strange and surprising story of Chris Yale, one of the evicted settlers. Human settlers on the Moon were routinely equipped with sophisticated neurological add-ons, fabulous wetware endowing entirely new senses on the user...wetware that is illegal on Earth. For architects Chris and Joanne Yale, the Moon was a building project worth going under the knife for. Surgically connected to their billion mechanical helpers, they were turning the moon into a paradise But when the machines decided to pull the plug, Chris and Joane were evacuated from the Moon and stripped of their plug-in senses. They settled in London, knowing they had to fight a long battle against madness and depression now their minds were merely human once more. Finally Chris attended an underground clinic run by bent policeman and would-be astronaut George Ballantyne. The illegal substance he was treated with, Respond, left him weak as a kitten and his view of the world leached of colour and life. This was intolerable to Joanne, and their marriage dwindled to nothing, until Chris left London.;And the next he heard of Joanne, she was dead. No one can explain why she was killed