Gaia's Web

When Daryl McIntyre wins a $30 million dollar grant from the Turing Challenge Committee to make a bold advance in artificial intelligence and prevent environmental collapse, he has no idea his theory will transform humanity. Cataclysmic earthquakes, deadly storms, endless drought and rising seas are threatening to wipe out life on Earth. Daryl and his neuroscientist wife Samantha recruit mathematician Martin and hardware wizard George to help design AGA, a consciously creative computer program. AGA predicts universal extinction - unless the team can expand the human mind. The researchers race against time to save mankind by inducing millennia of evolution in a single week. Testing the transformation program on themselves exposes secrets that strain their relationships to the breaking point. Accelerated evolution succeeds in uniting humanity but casualties mount among those who resist. What price must mankind pay to save the biosphere? Some believe terrorists or aliens have pacified the human race for their own purposes, and the scientists fear AGA's power - but no one suspects the far greater force at work just beneath their feet. Gaia's Web features a witty computer program learning to be more human, a complex romantic quadrangle, and four subplots with colorful characters responding in different ways to forced evolution. Meet a cruel tyrant in famine stricken Bolkanistan and the loyal compatriot who must betray him, a bold US President and his unruly cabinet, a disenchanted Wall Street stockbroker on the brink of divorce who dreams of the sea, and three teenage friends in a separatist religious sect plotting to escape the clutches of a paranoid polygamous preacher. The story weaves developing crises in these diverse settings around the social, scientific and spiritual complications confronting the research team. Gaia's Web catapults mankind into the postcyber age beyond cellphones and computers, turning doomsday into utopia.