Technobabylon takes place in the cyberpunk city of Newton. Newton is coordinated by a highly advanced AI known as Central which maintains the city's various systems and enforces the laws passed by the civilian government. Centralized Emergency Logistics (CEL) acts a police force under Central's direct authority. Technology has advanced greatly, with nano-mechanical wetware devices allowing people to modify their brain functions or mentally interface with computers. One such innovation is a virtual reality system called the Trance, in which users can socialize with others via constructed avatars or create content like games and virtual environments.
Plot
Latha Sesame, an unemployed shut-in addicted to the Trance, finds herself locked inside her apartment after being disconnected. Worried, she manages to bypass the door controls and escape. Moments later, there is an explosion in the building.
Twenty hours earlier, doctors Charles Regis and Max Lao, both agents of CEL, investigate a series of murders by an individual known as the Mindjacker. The Mindjacker uses specialized neural implants to steal information directly from a person's brain, killing the victim in the process. Following a lead from Central, Regis and Lao discover the Mindjacker's newest victim in an office building. They corner the suspect on the roof, but he escapes to an aerostat. Returning to his office, Regis finds an anonymous message urging him to get in contact with the sender. Upon doing so, the contact reveals that he has stolen several frozen embryos that Regis had prepared with his late wife Viksha before her death. The contact threatens to destroy the embryos if Regis does not cooperate with his demands. Unwilling to sacrifice his and his wife's legacy, Regis agrees to comply.
The blackmailer tasks Regis with recovering a device called a memory module from the apartment of Giel Van der Waal, a man with ties to organized crime and a person of interest in the Mindjacker case. Lao arrives to inform Regis that Giel has asked to meet, but when the duo arrive at his apartment they find Giel and his husband dead. Regis recovers the memory module and discovers that it corrupted a supply of wetware Giel was using, causing him to have vivid hallucinations which led him to accidentally kill his husband and himself. Regis turns the module over to the blackmailer and is then tasked with placing a bomb in an empty apartment, revealed to be the apartment directly above Latha's, making Regis responsible for the explosion.
Regis concludes that the blackmailer must be Adam Baxter, a former colleague who murdered Regis' wife and was recently paroled. Regis prepares to confront Baxter, but encounters Latha at CEL HQ. When she mentions the bombing at her apartment building, Regis realizes she was the intended target and orders her to be kept at CEL HQ for her safety before leaving for Baxter's workplace. Desperate to re-enter the Trance, Latha improvises a connection and encounters a hacker named Jinsil on CEL's network. Jinsil, a member of an anti-Central group called Jihiliyyah, warns Latha that the bombing was a deliberate attempt on her life and shows her a reconstruction of the crime scene, which shows Regis planting the bomb. Recognizing him as the officer she spoke to, Latha escapes from CEL HQ and arranges to make contact with Jinsil again.
Several hours later, Lao is visited by Central's administrator Eduardo Vargas and his daughter Galatea. Vargas, another former colleague of Regis, explains that Baxter has been found dead and Regis is the prime suspect. Lao is assigned to investigate and heads for the crime scene, where she finds a coded messages from Regis, claiming that Baxter was dead when he arrived and asking Lao to meet him at an abandoned building. During the investigation, Lao also learns that Regis, Viksha, Vargas, and Baxter were all part of the project that led to Central's creation, though Regis quit after Viksha was killed by Baxter. As Regis waits for Lao to arrive at the meeting place, he is attacked by a group of heavily-armed soldiers. An unknown woman makes contact with Regis and helps guide him out of the building, where he reunites with Lao, and Regis arranges to meet the mysterious woman in person.
Latha heads to an underground Trance den hosting a pirate connection and meets with Jinsil through it. Jinsil explains that Latha is most likely being targeted because she has an abnormally high affinity for the Trance, allowing massive amounts of data to be processed through her neural implants. Jinsil tasks Latha with infiltrating her attackers' base at the Xanadu air-freight depot, so that Jahiliyyah can use her as a relay to steal all of their data. At the same time, Regis meets with his rescuer and discovers her to be Nina Jeong, another member of Regis' old project team. Nina is leading a conspiracy to remove Central from power and replace it with a much simpler AI disguised as Central. Though the conspirators have different motives, Nina herself wants to capture Central and further improve it. Giel, who had been a member of the conspiracy, introduced the Mindjacker to a client as part of his criminal dealings. Afterwards, Giel discovered that the client's plans conflicted with those of the conspiracy and attempted to inform CEL before his death. Nina tells Regis that his blackmailer is the Mindjacker, a man named Jayam Kreisel, and directs him to Kreisel's hideout at Xanadu.
