Howard Pierce

Pavlov's Colon, Volume 1 Howard Pierce

Curtis Dresden, Director of the International Diplomatic Corp, has a spectacular and urgent problem to solve. Lester Cleland, 49thPresident of the United States, has raptured. Soaring naked from the Rose Garden during primetime news, Lester's exit has left the carefully managed social economies of the world in chaos. Stretching from Mormon data warehouses in Salt Lake City to a dope plantation in the mountains of Uganda, with stops in Telluride and Mombasa, Pavlov's colon is the story of Curtis' journey through serial revelations. Astonishing partners join his quest like Dahlgren, an international political operative who has dropped out to watch the world through the eyes of Buddha, and Danni the polymath child of Somali immigrants who sees the world as patterns that are invisible to others. Together they combine the power of a secret government quantum computer with Danni's mystical data visualization program, Serendipity, to recreate a malleable version of the immediate past made from the myriad piles of data left behind by the organizations and individuals who control the world. Figuring out the rapture turns out to be the easy part, deciding what to do about the social mutations that caused it is more complex.