In the not so distant future, Trouble calls herself a "crackers", and a damn good one (hackers that go into systems and crack ICE, the usual conceptual idea of "the grid" in cyberpunk). But when a law is passed making it so the government can convict and enforce harsh penalties on such activities, she bails -- On everyone. Her girlfriend Cerise comes home to find her and all her possessions gone, having told her that if this law passed she was out.

“You had to draw lines, and that choice was in itself dangerous; all boundaries had a double edge, were like swords that could always be turned against you in the end.
But you still had to choose.”

3 years later, Cerise is the head of security at a megacorp and Trouble is a syscop for a local cooperative. But when someone starts stirring up shit using Trouble's name and some of her old programs, her life is upended and she strikes out to clear her name. Something that will mean going back to her old life and her old friends.

Right off the bat I loved this book as it is unabashedly a critique on societal problems that still exist. Specifically safe spaces and how they are predominantly policed by unoppressed groups of people. Trouble, Cerise, and all her friends are queer, on the net and in real life and I loved the relationships there and the overt reference to the fact that they all considered each other a family and were the misfits of misfits. Crackers themselves are outlaws but they still discriminate against queer people in the same space.

“Alice in Wonderland, Alice down the rabbit hole, Alice out in Cyberspace, flung along the lines of data, flying across fields of light, the night cities that live only behind her eyes.”

So keeping that in mind, the story is essentially about a queer female being erased, especially online where someone literally takes her name. Whether who does so knew she was not dead or not, as there were rumors around that Trouble was, it brings into question when is it ok to do this; which is never. But the community divides when it becomes apparent Trouble is back and fractures at the exact point of contention: Why isn't it ok that someone uses her name if she's out of the life? Of course this is something that hits close to home, especially with those in the family. It was amazing to see explored in a cyberpunk story. SO. GOOD.

What ensues is a really original and interesting dystopian cyberpunk fiction with a main focus on LGBT+ people in the book, in fact I can only think of maybe 1-2 characters in it's entirety that were straight and these distinctions were made really apparent. It really, really made the story far more interesting and a vehicle for larger questions at play online spaces and technology as a means of control on a populace.

“Maybe that was why it was almost always the underclasses, the women, the people of color, the gay people, the ones who were already stigmatized as being vulnerable, availble, trapped by the body, who took the risk of the wire.”

Less subtle differences within a community are brought up as well, for instance Trouble and Cerise have brain worms that allow one to have waaay more control over their avatars. A group of people in the community attempt to erase those members as they "have a leg up" on everyone else, even though it's a choice to get it done or not. There's "dollie ports" that everyone has to interface with the digital world too. All of it centered around communities and how they function from a more focused viewpoint of just Trouble and her friends, to the larger issues plaguing the online communities that we STILL wrestle with. And this was published in '94.

“There were still too many people who were afraid of a technology that eluded them, still more who would never have access and resented and feared it in equal measures. Mobilize those groups just once, find a demagogue-and there always were demagogues-and the nets would find themselves destroyed.”

There's not much action and quite a bit of net walking, which is actually done very well and the most interestingly done for me, because I hate net walking stuff usually -- for my taste.

“Power rides her fingers, she moves from datashell to datashell, walking the nets like the ghost of a shadow, her trail vanishing behind her as she goes. She carries power in the dark behind her eyes.”

But the kind of fiction that results from focusing on community dynamics and the work going into making Trouble and Cerise's relationship rich, really resulted in great fiction. It's really apparent when minorities are represented well and the characters aren't cookie-cutter.

“This was what she hated most about the on-line world, the shadows as much as the bright lights of the legal nets: too many men assumed that the nets were exclusively their province, and were startled and angry to find out that it wasn't...rather than ever admit fear, they walked with raised hackles, looking for a fight.”

Combined with the prose, the characters drove this story to a satisfying ending for me but I will say it suffers from some pacing issues. The relationship between them while fleshed out more and more, never also sort of plateaued for me during this pacing pit fall. It was clearly to develop both characters more but it falls flat ultimately because neither actually manage to articulate their inner thoughts. Instead, the banter is what you'd find in a character who's got classic masculinity issues and it's mostly handled through their actions. Like I said, looking back I loved the book but these two small problems bring down the rating for me to 4/5. It was cruising for a perfect score for the first half, though. Would recommend it, the best book I've read from the "older" cyberpunk stuff so far. Especially focusing on issues that remain relevant today and some of the most believable characters in the fiction.

"You know damn well that's not how the wire works, and if you weren't afraid of it, you'd have one yourself. It's the same as the implants, just like the dollie-slots, but it gives me an edge, yeah, because I'm not afraid of it, of what I can do with it.”