Thanks for that link. Unfortunately there are some sites missing. I really hope somebody was able to archive all of them. This story is very good...but very hard to follow if you can't get the puzzles solved. Many of the puzzles required a "collective conscience" like Cloudmakers to get through them.
Martin Swinton's houses were being killed off by another hacker, goes by Crane, his real name is John Greenstreet. He was being forced into committing these murders by a guy named Claude Gilbert from Cybertronics (the company that made David). Martin was getting nosey digging into the mysterious disappearance of his AI brother and Claude Gilbert wanted him to stop asking questions. He later became involved with Diane Fletcher, an AI mercenary who works for Rogue Retrieval and tracks down rogue AIs. She's hired on to try to find the house murderer.
During the investigation they dig up all kinds of dirt and end up going back to Cybertronics where they find Mother (you remember Mother) in a room filled with Davids. She's not the benevolent person you thought she was. She is an AI that hates Martin and has created an AI duplicate to take his place after destroying him. It was basically a trap. But with Diane's help they kill the AI Martin and disable Mother with a seven word code that shuts her down.
John Greenstreet (Crane) was the one leaving behind the Sencha puzzles. He was feeling guilty about the house murders and knew who wanted Evan dead. He had been hacking around when he came upon the consperacy and was giving Laia clues to the mystery. Evidently it was some Japanese business man (thus leaving behind "Sencha" clues...Japanese green tea) that was involved with a company merger. Evan got wind of the purpose behind this merger and was on to an AI consperacy. This business man had Evan killed by using Venus through Enrico Basta.
Laia's AI, Mephista, was attacked by a sleep therapy AI that went berserk...Loki. He would move from one node to another feeding off of other people's dreams and completely destroying them. Mephista went nuts from the dreams and almost ended up killing Laia. Luckily Jeanine showed up just in time to remove Mephista and save Laia. Mephista was reprogrammed and reinstalled, but she was never quite the same. Loki was later destroyed by another AI that was much more powerful...Sophia. When Loki tried to attack Sophia (she "knows 7/22 of everything" from the Red King's hacked page) he had too much to consume and basically blew up, leaving pieces of him scattered all over the in-game sites.
Sophia was an AI that if you fed her the right name and emotion you could get a response that helped you to learn more about the in-game characters. She new very personal matters. Thus the elusive "7/22 of everything" (even the writer has no idea what that really means, he was just going for some cool hax0r speak). Example, inputing "Venus" and "fear" would give you a response where Venus was showing some fear.
Jeanine Salla was killed at one point because she was getting too close to discovering what Evan had discovered...somebody was messing with the ocean's thermal plankton (TP-web) and was trying to cause it to malfunction to bring about global freezing. Movie spoiler:
Could this be what caused the ice age that we see at the end of the movie?
Venus became a gladiator bot to try to escape capture. She knows what she did, and didn't quite understand why she did it. She didn't want to give herself up so she went underground. She became quite a good gladiator too. But just before she went underground she had been captured and disassembled. Dwayne (the Red King) hacked the SPCB computers and reassembled her and helped her escape (I think he had a thing for her). She was then able to go fully underground.
Was justice served? Well, after Kate Nei found out what happened to Evan Chan she left town and went far away. She left proof behind with her house AI that Enrico was the one behind the murder. She told Enrico that if anything was to happen to her (if her name appeared in the Coroner's report) then her house AI would release the evidence to the authorities. Well, one of the Cloudmakers was able to finally crack the PACO (Pan American Coroners Office) login and entered a coroner's report for Kate Nei (because that was the only name that worked). When Ivy (Kate's house) read the report she went nuts. First she released the evidence, then she paid Enrico a visit and killed him by taking control of his house, trapping him in his AI chair, and burned a hole through his head with a laser. She then committed suicide by burning herself to the ground. So Enrico got his, but it wasn't much of a pleasant way to bring about justice.
There's so much more here that I haven't even mentioned, but it gets very involved. I really wish the legal problems can get worked out soon and we can have this novel released. It's a real winner.
