at a time when computer messages included letter prompts like “A>” to indicate the source drive, A>LOVERBOY imagines the world as it might be at the start of the 21st century. Lucy Beckwith, a computer whiz, starts getting mysterious messages through her computer from someone who calls himself Loverboy and claims to be mad about her. His messages are so romantic, she finds herself falling for him. He’s the antithesis of Jim Kazan, her colleague at Access Computer Systems. Voted the Sexiest Felon of 1988 thanks to his illegal hacking, Jim is brilliant, arrogant and egotistical. She fears he’s going to take over her “Smart Town” project, and she resents the way he flirts with every female he sees. Jim may flirt, but Lucy is the woman he wants. That she’s pretty is a bonus, but her intelligence is what really turns him on. Yet he can’t seem to break through her defenses the way Loverboy can. Jim and Lucy collaborate and compete as they live their lives in Horizon, Kansas, a major center for high-tech research now that a devastating earthquake in California has prompted a wholesale relocation of Silicon Valley to a more geologically stable region. The imagined world Jim and Lucy inhabit is filled with flat-screen TV’s, instant messaging, movies-on-demand, electric cars, heart-healthy restaurant menus and Velcro-closing diapers—none of which actually existed when the book was written and published. But life for these two high-tech geniuses gets a lot more complicated when Lucy realizes she loves someone who can only connect with her through her computer, and when an orphaned survivor of the California earthquake shows up in Horizon announcing she’s Jim’s daughter.
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