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A review by mousie_books
Forest of Memory by Mary Robinette Kowal
4.0
Slow start, but interesting ending.
Katya stumbles onto a man tranquilizing and injecting nanoprobes into deer. He kidnaps her, so that she will not interfere until he finishes task. While she is in his presence, her connection to the network is dampened. He mentions her client list is valuable to his boss, but does not explain how/why. He implies he has planted a tracker on her.
One day, he comes back from his hunt injured and covered in blood. He lets her go to get help, but when she returns, he is gone as are all traces of the camp and his work. On examination, the blood on Katya is deer blood, and no tracker is found in/on her.
So... now the question is... why fake all of that. Also, what was he doing with the deer? It's hinted that the deer were implanted with something that dampens connects to the net, and that like a virus, it infects the 'smart dust' which is used to track people. Katya speculates that perhaps she is similarly infected, and perhaps even targeted. Perhaps, her client, the buyer of this record (and the dusty typewriter that was in her possession when she was kidnapped) is also a target.
Spoiler
Everything is monitored and recorded. People have implants that connect them to the network 24/7 and depend on them the way we depend on cell phones now. There is a market for 'authentic' experiences and traceable provenance even though digital manipulation doesn't hurt the perceivable end product. (NFT's anyone?)Katya stumbles onto a man tranquilizing and injecting nanoprobes into deer. He kidnaps her, so that she will not interfere until he finishes task. While she is in his presence, her connection to the network is dampened. He mentions her client list is valuable to his boss, but does not explain how/why. He implies he has planted a tracker on her.
One day, he comes back from his hunt injured and covered in blood. He lets her go to get help, but when she returns, he is gone as are all traces of the camp and his work. On examination, the blood on Katya is deer blood, and no tracker is found in/on her.
So... now the question is... why fake all of that. Also, what was he doing with the deer? It's hinted that the deer were implanted with something that dampens connects to the net, and that like a virus, it infects the 'smart dust' which is used to track people. Katya speculates that perhaps she is similarly infected, and perhaps even targeted. Perhaps, her client, the buyer of this record (and the dusty typewriter that was in her possession when she was kidnapped) is also a target.