"Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.
Earth
has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they
are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a
gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or
another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar
system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the
sun.
The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has
largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds
sometimes wander…and when that happens, it casually spams Earth's
networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that
emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane
species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there's
always someone who'll take a bite from the forbidden apple.
So
until the overminds bore of stirring Earth's anthill, there's Tech Jury
Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing
dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young
Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the
latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy
technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful
moments on bathroom floors."
So
until the overminds bore of stirring Earth's anthill, there's Tech Jury
Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing
dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young
Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the
latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy
technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful
moments on bathroom floors."