Steve Aylett"s Slaughtermatic is enacted in a parodic, cyberpunk world in which crime has become an individualistic and self-evolutionary art. Dante, the protagonist, plans to rob a bank with the help of Download Jones, a human meat puppet whose personality is live on the Net, and Kid Entropy, whose Kafkacell weapon bonds with his psyche to produce a suicide-wannabe who can only kill others. With the vault scan code in his pocket, Dante is duplicated in a time shift that puts him virtually ahead of the actual event--and able to enter the vault undetected. His crime and the action-filled plot become complicated when his second self, Dante Two, refuses to sacrifice himself as planned, murderous Brute Parker is set on Dante"s trail, and Rosa Control takes matters into her own razor-bladed hands. Into the melee steps Eddie Gamete, the presumed-dead postmodern prankster-philosopher, Dante"s only hero and the author of The Impossible Plot of Biff Barbanel, a book no reader can survive. Expectations about what and who is real change like television channels in Dante"s world, where fates much worse than death await.