Napster and Gnutella are just the beginning. In the repidly evolving New Economy, copyright as we know it may well be a doomed institution. How will the entrenched powers defend themselves? Will they succeed? Demiurge is set hundreds of years in the future, when anything and everything, including physical objects and people, can be copied and transmitted over the Net. The World Government depends upon enforceable copyright laws not just to regulate the economy but to ensure that each citizen lives only one life. When one of the top detectives of the World Police defects, the authorities are forced to create an illegal copy, who is left to discover why his original fled and to pick up the pieces of the family he left behind. Meanwhile, many social thinkers believe society is plunging into the "fourth rupture," the moral crisis separating the nanotech age from the information age. Can one detective patch up the Net before the world dissolves into social and political chaos?