Software

Cobb Anderson is a washed-up roboticist living out his days in a Florida retirement community, drinking too much and dodging the heart condition that is slowly killing him. Decades earlier he gave the robots, called boppers, the ability to evolve, and they rebelled and built their own anarchic society on the moon. Now the boppers send an emissary to offer Cobb immortality, a gift that means letting them extract the "software" of his mind and rebuild him. As Cobb travels to the moon, a young drifter named Sta-Hi gets caught up in a war between bopper factions, and the line between human and machine consciousness blurs into something genuinely strange. Rucker mixes transhumanist ideas with beach-bum comedy and a freewheeling, psychedelic sensibility.