The second in the series that began with The Leaping, set in a malevolent call-center that just might be alive—affirming Tom Fletcher as the dark master for the "temp" generation When Artemis Black is assigned to manage a call center in the bleak coastal town of Whitehaven on behalf of a mysterious multinational corporation called Interext, the isolation and remoteness of the place encourage him to implement a decidedly unhinged project. He installs what purports to be cutting-edge AI technology, with a real, "human" voice, on the automated answering systems. As a result, one of his employees, Arthur, becomes aware of an intangible landscape inside the labyrinthine systems of the call-center—a landscape in which he can feel some kind of otherworldly consciousness stirring and in which, perhaps as a result of his father's increasingly alarming eccentricities, he feels that he could find his recently deceased mother.
