Join

What if you could live multiple lives simultaneously, have constant, perfect companionship, and never die? That's the promise of Join, a revolutionary technology that allows small groups of minds to unite, forming a single consciousness that experiences the world through multiple bodies. But as two best friends, Chance and Lucky, living in an alternate version of our own near future quickly discover, the light of that miracle may be blinding them to its horrors.

Jolted out of comfortable, professional routines by a brutal encounter with a terrifying stranger and a malfunction in the join technology, Chance and Lucky follow a faint trail of clues off the grid in their desperate search for a cure. Their journey leads them into the scarred heart of the North American continent. There, within the improvised shelter of the "solos" left behind by the rush of technology, they encounter the architects of a new kind of human consciousness. With the planet descending into environmental ruin, their trust of each other becomes their only guide through the moral hazards of a society in which individual identity has come undone. Along the way, they must confront their own long-buried secrets, and learn how their story of injured conscience connects them to the arc of human evolution.

A deftly crafted, kaleidoscopic novel with the pulse of a thriller, Join explores big ideas in the current zeitgeist on an intimate, human scale.

Steve Toutonghi has spent over twenty years in the technology industry in Silicon Valley and Seattle. He has co-founded companies and worked for market leaders in media and enterprise software. Steve studied poetry and fiction while completing a degree in Anthropology at Stanford. He has worked in radio, at fish processors on the Kenai Peninsula and in Bristol Bay, and on commercial fishing sites. Steve lived in Japan for three years, and has hitch-hiked the length of the Pacific Coast from the Kenai Peninsula to San Francisco. Passionate about the art of storytelling, Steve has read over 125 books out-loud to entertain his wife and their gray cat, Steinbeck.Join is his first novel.