The Reality Engineers

Dizzy Weatherspark has spent most of her life being helped across rooms. The childhood accident that left her legs a crosshatch of scar tissue and surgical reconstruction also left her with a very specific area of expertise: building things that should not work, and then making them work anyway. The Quantum-Responsive Exoskeleton is her masterpiece — black carbon fiber and copper, neural interface crown, servos that answer to thought. The first test runs for forty-seven glorious seconds before the feedback loop, the fire, and the manual kill switch. But in the wreckage, something unprecedented: Dizzy stands under her own power for the first time since she was eight years old. Her team calls themselves the Reality Engineers. They probably should have thought harder about that name. Because Jetta has a guitar built from circuits that fold through extra dimensions, and when she plays it, walls go briefly transparent and light bends in colors that don't exist in the normal human spectrum. Terry has a helmet that floats objects in synchronized orbits and lets her push thoughts outward like radio signals. Misto has an algorithm that rewrites itself in microsecond iterations and breaks military-grade encryption in under thirty seconds, leaving no trace it was ever there. And somewhere out in the city, something is distorting reality in a blue-purple shimmer that looks exactly like all four of their technologies at once — and a man called Von Wolfenstein, precise and formal and several centuries more patient than anyone has a right to be, is very interested in what they've built. The technologies were developed separately. When they synchronize for the first time, what they produce together is something none of them designed and all of them can feel. Reality, it turns out, has always been more of a suggestion than a law. The Reality Engineers are about to find out what happens when you start editing it. The Reality Engineers is a science fiction novel about four people who built impossible things in a university basement and accidentally became the most dangerous team on the planet. Whether that's good or bad depends entirely on which side of the distortion you're standing on.