TYLER J. reviewed on 8/15/2015

This book remains oen of my all time favorite fiction pieces. It's clever, unique, and easy to follow. It's based entirely on the old addage, "On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog".

Also, the dog does NOT die at the end. Whoever wrote that is dead wrong.

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My interpretation of the synopsis is as follows:

This novel documents the story of an aging detection dog, named Byte, who was once trained by the military to assist in counter-cyberterrorism missions deemed too risky for his human handlers. Similarly to a bloodhound, he was used to enter dangerous areas and identify the target they were seeking. To accomplish the complex feat of tracking cyberterrorists, Byte was part of a series of mammals bred and genetically modified to possess human-level intelligence (but without the ability to speak human languages to make him difficult to torture for extracting information) for use in military operations.

The year is 1999 AD, and it is the onset of the new millinium. Amid the height of fears regarding the Year 2000 problem, terroristic threats are intercepted by the American government. They indicated a credible threat that electronic sabotage was to be executed on urban America's various sewage treatment networks unless a ransom was satisfied alongside the unusual demand that Lincoln Memorial was presented to the cyberterrorist "to be freely altered in any way he wants". If the threat was carried out, it would have destroyed the electronic machinary for sewage treatment, effectively ending indoor plumbing in the country's cities for months, if not years. The social upheaval would have been tremendous.

Byte, having long severed connections with his handlers and adopted by a civilian family, was pressed by the military to engage in one last counter-cyberterrorism mission. To do this, he would need to gather "trustworthy individuals" from his new home to "sniff out" and lead the police to the cyberterrorist before he could back up the American cities' sewers.

Byte elects to employ three Internet colleagues that he had been anonymously chatting with for years to carry out this search mission. Each of these three colleagues, and Byte himself, all used the cloak of anonymity to pretend they were something they were not, leading to great surprise when they all met each other.

They engage in their mission and ultimately meet the source of the threats. The cyberterrorist is a direct descendant of the inventor of the portable plastic outhouse, or "port-o-potty", who believes that his ancestor's invention is "unappreciated" and in sore need of the "recognition that it so deserves". His plan, by forcing urban America to abandon its indoor plumbing, is to create a massive surge in demands for portable plastic outhouses, both to honor his family's legacy and, obviously, to make him wealthy.

The cyberterrorist's unusual ransom demand to alter the Lincoln Memorial was the ultimate means of honoring his family. He wanted to resculpt Abraham Lincoln's face to mirror the inventor of the "port-o-potty" and convert the marble building housing Lincoln (now the port-o-potty's inventor) on his "throne" (a slang term to also refer to a toilet) into a replica of a portable plastic outhouse!

Naturally, Byte and company thwarted this scheme. The book concluded with "I'll never look at [a portable plastic outhouse] the same way again.".

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