Intelligence runs in the family and Naomi is quite brilliant, as well, having developed a method of quickly regrowing limbs, however she is unsure of herself and feels it requires much more testing. Colt doesn't agree and submits her digital paper to a stem cell conference and naturally, they invite her to speak on her incredible breakthrough. However, Naomi's ex-husband Ryan works for the NSA, now called the NSDA, and he tells her she must not release this information as it could fall into the wrong hands. When she ignores him, Ryan puts into motion a plan to digitally erase the breakthrough as if it never happened, causing Naomi much distress and also delaying her in New York.
Meanwhile, with Naomi off at the conference, Colt decides to finally move forward with something he has been working on for a long time - upgrading his brain. He finally decides to take action after interacting with a girl named Sasha in his game, and then meeting her in real life when she delivers a pizza to his house in order to meet him. Naturally, Colt bungles the interaction and sends Sasha running, but now he desperately wants to be able to talk to her the way others can so easily and he proceeds with the upgrade, using parts of his mother's research. When Naomi finally gets home, she finds Colt in very bad shape and once she realizes what he has done, she must act quickly to save his life. She must also hide the upgrade from Ryan, because he would love nothing more than to press Colt into service with him in the government, since now, Colt is essentially a supercomputer.
Soon, Naomi and Colt are on the run from not only Ryan, but also an invasive program called the immune system he has built to locate terrorists before they even get a chance to commit a crime and, unfortunately, this software is now in control of everything and is hunting the mother and son as perceived threats. Can Colt find a way to hide them from Ryan and defeat this software, even as it chases him into his own game?
First, let me say this about Connect: If you find yourself triggered by anything that touches on sexual assault, you need to avoid this book. There are BDSM scenes, as well as straight up sexual assault scenes in this book and I can see that being pretty problematic for someone not expecting them. I didn't really get the reason for the BDSM stuff to be included and, while it did eventually get called back into play and have a point, I just didn't really like those aspects, personally. Julian Gough has an interesting way of writing, very conversationally, and I did enjoy it, but if you are looking for something light in the science department, this isn't it. There are lots of quotes at the beginnings of sections of the book from well-known scientists, philosophers and writers, and also sections from the perspective of a god-like computer system which claims to be controlling everything, neither of which I particularly enjoyed.
I felt like the action didn't really kick into high gear until about halfway through the book, but there were some pretty exciting points when Colt and Naomi are on the run and I did enjoy the futuristic description of Las Vegas, complete with robotic singing gondoliers at the Venetian. I just think that, for me, the book focused a lot on science and philosophy and, consequently, wasn't as much fun of a read as I was expecting and typically prefer.
