I met the author of this book at SDCC this summer, and they pitched it to me as "Gay robots and drug pirates." I said SOLD, and bought it immediately. What a good decision that was! It's been awhile since I found a sci-fi book which was this smart, wildly inventive and fun to read. Newitz tosses off more ideas and world-defining-details on a single page than some authors do in a whole book. Set in 2144, the planet Earth in this book has been rapidly remade by climate change, re-configured national boarders, AI technology,legal human indenture and the patenting of medicines, drugs and gene therapies. Jack is a loner and a Robin Hood-engineer, trying to get meds into the hands of those too poor to afford them. Eliasz is an agent in the military branch of the International Property Coalition, sent to hunt down and eliminate the source of the illegally-sourced drugs. Paladin is a humanoid AI robot, newly created and partnered with Eliasz on the mission. The plot crosses multiple continents, love and betrayal, memes, laws, and meditations on the nature of freedom. The whole story was a completely delight, but the quote that will be sitting with me for a while is this: “But now we know there has been no one great disaster—only the slow-motion disaster of capitalism converting every living thing and idea into property.”