Reduced to scavenging for subsistence scraps among the trash people of San Francisco, Carly Nolan may have finally found her re-entry into the fast lane. Together with her onetime probe therapist Pr. Spinner - an aging and suspicious standalone A.I. entity with rusty, ill-defined housing - the disgraced linker is summoned back into public telespace by a tri-headed mainframe icon called Cognatus. And Cognatus has an offer Carly Nolan dares not refuse: a job, a future...and absolution. But there are sticky strings attached. Carly's new assignment - a telespacial hunt for unconnected human archetypes - has aroused some dangerous interest back in the real world. A ruthless mercenary Ultra fembot with fluid loyalties is now dogging her trail. The young shaman of a savage urban tribe has become obsessed with the beautiful "genny woman" who has sacrificed her soul to the "Glass Land." And worst of all, Carly herself may be no more than an unsuspecting pawn of the Silicon Supremacists - a renegade cabal of A.I. revolutionaries planning no less than the total destruction of humankind.

Jerzy Rugby is trying to create truly intelligent robots. While his actual life crumbles, Rugby toils in his virtual office, testing the robots online. Then, something goes wrong and zillions of computer virus ants invade the net. Rugby is the man wanted for the crime. He's been set up to take a fall for a giant cyberconspiracy and he needs to figure out who — or what — is sabotaging the system in order to clear his name. Plunging deep into the virtual worlds of Antland of Fnoor to find some answers, Rugby confronts both electronic and all-too-real perils, facing death itself in a battle for his freedom.

Set in 2030–2031, ten years after the events of Software, Wetware focuses on the attempt of an Edgar Allan Poe-obsessed bopper named Berenice to populate Earth with a robot/human hybrid called a meatbop. Toward this end, she implants an embryo in a human woman living on the Moon (Della Taze, Cobb Anderson's niece) and then frames her for murder to force her to return to Earth. After only a few days, she gives birth to a boy named Manchile, who has been genetically programmed to carry bopper software in his brain (and in his sperm), and to grow to maturity in a matter of weeks.