Our greatest and proudest creation, the internet, has continued to dazzle us with its breakneck evolution. Reaching ever higher levels of complexity, it has served us well, deeply affecting us and our civilization, but will it continue to do so? Will it ever be conscious? When and how will human technology spin out of control as is expected? These and other questions are pondered by scientists of an obscure institute in Cambridge when they are drawn into a vortex of catastrophic events that converge upon Bruno Haslop, a software tester in a personal crisis.

In their investigation full of...