Synopsis: Desert Rats

"A robot that goes out and brings your mail in for you: Good idea. A robot that goes out and ignores the mailbox but chases three Girl Scouts down the street while shooting electric sparks from its claws and calling for its 'mommy?' Bad, bad idea. If it ever comes home, we're taking the batteries out and turning it into a coat rack."

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Branded from childhood as the brainy chick who could MacGyver a whimsical but effective solution to any problem (with the annoying exception of her persistent boyfriend-free status), Melanie Page loves being an industrial engineer more than just about anything. Anything, that is, except hanging with her offbeat friends and her quirky grandparents. Mel's after-hours hobby is robotics, and her misfit crew of "geek-artists" always have half a dozen wild--but plausibly useful!--projects in the works. She's also keenly interested in the well-being of her hometown: Tucson, Arizona.

All of which gets her--and her friends--into loads of trouble with a range of authority figures every time she tries to do what she thinks is the right thing.

Like that time she stole part of an old fighter jet from the local Air Force base, to build a sturdy but lightweight electric wheelchair for a homeless person in her neighborhood. ("They seriously weren't ever gonna use that stuff again...")

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Tucson has been growing like crazy since the 1990s; it's 2014 now, and the city can't manage its own sprawling development. Rising crime, shaky property values, dwindling water resources and impossibly long commute times are just harbingers of even worse problems to come. Meanwhile, the national economy still sucks, and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base faces almost certain closure due to federal budget cuts, threatening to wipe out a major source of the city's tight revenue.

Never one to sit back while there's a problem to be solved (and being preternaturally oblivious to the forces aligned behind the status quo), Mel joins a civic group that proposes a radical redesign for a mile-wide stretch of Tucson's urban core: erecting a high-tech, environmentally sustainable "arcology"-style mixed-use development to house tens of thousands of the city's people and their businesses and livelihoods while efficiently generating much of its own energy, food and water.

Despite -- or rather, because of -- the ambitious project's potential to benefit Tucson on many levels, Mel soon finds herself in the crosshairs of corrupt political, business and military leaders determined to sabotage meaningful civic renewal in order to make whatever profit they can in the short term, through the cynical dismantling of one of the country's fastest growing and most culturally vibrant urban areas.

And when Mel and her motley band of tech-loving amigos decide to fight back against the machinery of corruption as best they can -- using machines of their own creation -- their vigilante hacktivism uncovers powerful secrets older than the United States itself, and puts the people she loves in more danger than any of them could have imagined...