Face Smuggler

Creating a new face was child's play, but constructing a whole new identity? Now that was a work of art. Grayson was an artist ... The genteel called him a merchant of the dead. However, he thought of himself as a purveyor of ghosts.

It seemed like a simple job until Grayson met Alice: an advanced AI with human memories claiming to be a young heiress. What he thought would be routine smuggle gets turned sideways as hostile agents pursue Alice and seek to eliminate anyone who has come in contact with her. Now, Grayson must piece together the truth about her identity before they both wind up dead.

Face Smuggler is a thought provoking science-fiction adventure set in a future where mankind has colonized the solar system but has yet to unify under a single hegemony or reach out to the distant stars. It is richly evocative of its setting, and its themes raise the question of what makes us who we are, especially in an age of reproducibility. Among its themes are the role of memory and the past in constituting personhood and identity - for indeed, not all the demons people run from can be escaped by distance alone.

Underlying Face Smuggler is also an homage to the central question of the cyberpunk genre: the line between man, machine, and the ability to transition back and forth between the two. There is a preponderance of 'ghosts' in Face Smuggler: the ghosts of those whom Grayson helps find new identities, the ghost fragments in memory engrams, the ghost activity found in AI programs, and lastly the ghost that is Alice herself. This meaningful equivocation drives home the unanswered question at the heart of the story: If there is something deeper underlying the reality of each and every one of us, what is it?

In short, Face Smuggler balances the pacing of space opera with the careful considerations of hard sci-fi to weave a character driven narrative against a vividly detailed background while freshly evoking classic questions of the genre.

Parent's Guide:

Light use of profanity (s--- twice; d--- four times; GD twice)

Some violence and fighting

No sexual content