Light Music

<p align="left">Once the world worked differently -- before <i>the Silence</i> from space quieted the airwaves and rendered electronics useless.</p><p align="left">Once there was a haven called Crescent City, built through the wonders of nanotechnology to transport its enlightened inhabitants into the cosmos, far away from the chaos and terrors of a world gone mad. But humanity has failed the city. And carelessness has left it vulnerable to attack from those who covet the health and prosperity it offers.</p><p align="left">One of the original <i>pioneers</i> -- a recipient of the DNA-altering virus affecting a remarkable few who were born at the Silence's onset-Jason Peabody must now flee in the wake of an unanticipated assault on Crescent City by pirates. In the city-imposed persona of musical six-gun-toting Radio Cowboy, entrusted with the recovery of lost technology needed to heal the sentient metropolis and rocket it upward, he embarks on a bizarre odyssey across a perilous, unrecognizable outside -- through a landscape of Western round-ups and tragically "youngening" children; of plague-ravaged humans in foreboding <i>flower cities</i>; of conscious machines, talking animals, and toys that long to be real. With him is Dania, a brilliant scientist and resilient survivor whose hidden, troubled past is now painfully remembered beyond the walls of her urban sanctuary.</p><p align="left">But even as Dania and her Cowboy journey westward, others are being relentlessly drawn to Crescent City from all parts of the globe -- and two from the moon, the last humans remaining from the inexplicably vanished Unity colony.</p><p align="left">For an existence that is not as it was is on the brink of yet another astonishing transformation -- either by grand design or random cosmic accident. And the appearance on Earth of strange unearthly illuminations is causing widespread fear and panic -- as pilgrims from everywhere gather in Crescent City seeking answers to the Silence's long-concealed mysteries, responding to the hypnotic light music that's calling them toward a remarkable destiny in the stars.</p>