AI lacks consciousness, until it borrows self-awareness from a human host.
Dustin "Dusty" Gordon is a man without a world. The son of a rocket scientist mother, and the commander of the first mission to Mars, he possesses the talents of neither. Instead, he likes to tinker-around the home, in the garage, in high school shop class.
Born on Mars, he returned to Earth with his parents, only to struggle under Earth's oppressive gravity, and the weight of his famous parents' expectations. After graduation he returns to Mars but finds fitting in with the blue-collar guilds difficult.
Unrest is afoot. The guilds chafe at COO Randall Skinner's plans to force the laborers to upgrade their brain implants and train their own AI-controlled replacements.
Sent to repair a faulty train switch, Dusty's exoskeleton suit shorts out, exposing him to the icy cold of Mars miles from help. Retrieved severely hypothermic and hypoxic, Dusty is saved by the very neurosurgeon who upgrades the brain implants. Using a higher concentration of nanite electrodes, he replaces Dusty's brain function lost in the accident.
The solar system's first cybernetic mind must now navigate the guilds, who accuse him of collaboration with the COO, and Randall Skinner himself, who perceives Dusty as his greatest obstacle to his own control and wealth.