This is the way the world ends:
A nuclear strike on a deep sea vent. The target was an ancient microbe—voracious enough to drive the whole biosphere to extinction—and a handful of amphibious humans called rifters who'd inadvertently released it from three billion years of solitary confinement.
The resulting tsunami killed millions. It's not as through there was a choice: saving the world excuses almost any degree of collateral damage.
Unless, of course, you miss the target.
Now North America's west coast lies in ruins. Millions of refugees rally around a mythical figure mysteriously risen from the deep sea. A world already wobbling towards collapse barely notices the spread of one more blight along its shores. And buried in the seething fast-forward jungle that use to be called Internet, something vast and inhuman reaches out to a woman with empty white eyes and machinery in her chest. A woman driven by rage, and incubating Armageddon.
Her name is Lenie Clarke. She's a rifter. She's not nearly as dead as everyone thinks.
And the whole damn world is collateral damage as far as she's concerned . . .
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Peter Watts is a science fiction writer and a marine-mammal biologist. In addition to a number of accolades for science fiction—including the Aurora, Hugo, and Shirley Jackson Awards—Watts has won minor awards in fields as diverse as marine mammal research and documentary filmmaking. He lives in Toronto.