Crescent City Rhapsody

<p align="left"><center>This is how it begins...</p><p align="left">...<b>with the Silence,</b> born of mysterious, space-originated phenomena that render Earth's dominant technologies useless -- inspiring paranoia and alien invasion fears within secret government agencies, which, in turn, inspire repressive actions against a perceived enemy populace.</p><p align="left">...<b>and with murder,</b> as New Orleans mob boss and voudoun queen, Marie Laveau, dies in a hail of gunfire -- and is remade through the wonders of nanotechnology.</p><p align="left">In a new world that necessity has transfigured -- an exhilarating, seething stew of microscopic machinery and genetic engineering; of totalinarianism, eco-terrorism and violence -- Marie Laveau's hunger for vengance is giving way to something greater.</p><p align="left">For Destiny has named her savior of the outcasts, the opressed, the crazies, the hunted and the Silence's mutant children, who all flock to her dream of a future as sweet as an Ellington riff...and a safe haven called Crescent City.</center></p>