Cyber Dreams

In the year 2107, megacorps and those who rule them enjoy lives of extraordinary comfort and ease, while most people barely scrape by. Juliet Bianchi works cutting metal in a scrapyard and doesn't have much to show for it except a small group of fiercely loyal friends. When she stumbles upon what looks like a botched kidnapping, the victim dispatches his abductors and lives just long enough to give her a stolen AI chip. This gift soon transforms Juliet from a worker bee into a killer queen — armed with far more power and skill than she can comprehend, let alone control. She finds herself drawn into a shadowy world where survival itself counts as victory. Juliet has never been one to push people around. But when it comes to fighting corrupt corporate overlords, she's more than happy to push back.

Juliet Bianchi stumbled upon a kidnapping gone wrong and ended up with a stolen AI chip that took her from the bottom of the barrel to a top-tier realm of mercs, freelancers, and assorted unsavory folk. With a little help from her embedded AI, Angel, she quickly proved herself as an operator — adapting, overcoming obstacles, and kicking some serious ass. Now known as "January," she's still dealing with a betrayal that put her and her crew in danger and emptied her coffers. To get out of Tucson — and maybe off-world — she'll have to start pulling paying jobs again. When she's hired to infiltrate Grave Industries, Juliet discovers she may have to pay a price of her own: the job requires her to become an entirely different person in body and mind, and the deeper undercover she goes, the more she fears her new identity will control her life far longer than she'd like.

Once a scrap-wrangling nobody from Phoenix, Arizona, Juliet Bianchi's life was forever changed when fate handed her a hyper-advanced AI chip that launched her into the arena of high-powered, high-stakes operators. To her surprise — and everyone else's — she had a natural talent for cybernetic-enhanced mayhem and mercenary work. Now that work takes Juliet off-world for the first time, because her faithful friend Honey and a child prodigy she was caring for have been kidnapped. All evidence points to their abductors heading somewhere near Saturn. To get there, Juliet must join the crew of a rundown salvage ship — and endure a blast from the past. She soon finds herself accepted by the ragtag squad, who appreciate her recently upgraded talents in both combat and tech. Because Juliet isn't just rescuing her friend anymore. The future of humanity itself is in her hands.

Juliet Bianchi used to be a lowly scrap scrounger in Arizona. But when she was accidentally implanted with a beyond-awesome AI chip, her life changed dramatically — nanotechnology, bodywork, and other enhancements included. Now she's a high-powered weapon-for-hire, hiding as a not-so-lowly scrap scrounger. When a new gig calls for her to board a swanky cruise ship bound for Io, Juliet is happy to live the high life for a while — and test her latest upgrades, which include telekinesis and mind-reading. But when she uses her new mental abilities on a crowd of passengers, she picks up some unwanted intel: there's an assassin onboard on their way to make a hit. Juliet will have to balance being a cold-blooded mercenary herself with stopping a fellow killer. And then things actually get complicated.

Juliet Bianchi has evolved from a lowly scrap cutter to a fully-loaded, combat-ready dark-side operator. Known as "Lucky," she takes high-risk jobs for high-tech upgrades — weaponry, super reflexes, mind reading — that make her nearly invulnerable. Nearly. After recovering and reuniting with her crewmates from the salvage trawler Kowashi, Juliet gets that old itch: to infiltrate, and hopefully subvert, the all-powerful WBD megacorporation that created the AI that changed her life — and find out just what she might be becoming. To do that, she must assemble a team of expert covert mercs and accept help from the last person she'd ever want: Tanaka, the man who once dealt her a beating she barely survived.

Fighting through the dark underbelly of civilization, Juliet Bianchi has become a top-tier mercenary with a heart of gold. A shadowy, high-priced operative embedded with high-tech AI, she goes by "Lucky" — and the life she once led as a metal scrapper seems eons behind her. Now, armed with her own formidable monoblade, she's stepping away from business to handle something personal. Not long ago, Juliet went to the wall for her former best friend Ghoul and her kin — only to end up betrayed. She's finally discovered where her old ally has been hiding, but the corporation that developed the tech she carries has been waiting for her to make exactly this kind of mistake.