At one point, Robert Gu gets frustrated, and tries to open a black box under the hood of a car, using a kind of matter beam ( using ball bearings!). Plus, it's supposed to make things simpler. This is done to protect copyrights and trade secrets. Black Box: Pretty much all engineering is done by putting together modular black boxes whose contents are unknown, except to the companies that manufacture them.(Vinge mentions that royalties from the Discworld virtual reality have allowed Terry Pratchett to buy up a substantial chunk of Scotland.) Basically, you can participate in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game while walking down the street. You can build custom views of things, but most people prefer to participate in one of the many overlapping shared virtual worlds, usually based on popular works of fiction, like Discworld. Augmented Reality: 'Wearables' provide this through smart contact lenses (among other things).Wearables are as common in the world of Rainbows End as cell-phones are today, especially among the young. The book spends a lot of time exploring the implications of 'wearables'-powerful, light-weight networked computers that use contact lenses or glasses for display, and subtle gestures for input a logical extension of today's smartphone technology.

As it turns out, The Rabbit has his own plans for the anti-Librareome group. Dismayed, he joins a group seeking to stop this action, known as the Librareome Project. Meanwhile, Robert Gu has discovered that the library at the University of San Diego is about to be digitized using a destructive process that shreds the physical books. So, posing as South American drug lords, they approach a secretive hacker known as The Rabbit to help them find a way into the San Diego labs. The team formed by Braun and Vaz decide that a direct approach to the American government would be too risky-the Americans might be behind the virus. The second story is of Robert Gu, a world-famous poet, who has recently been cured of his Alzheimer's and given rejuvenation treatments, and is now living with his son in San Diego and learning to cope with the changes in the world in the years since he started becoming senile. Unfortunately, Vaz is the man secretly behind the virus, which he believes is the only way to end terrorism forever. The first story is of Grünberk Braun, a member of the European Union Intelligence Board who discovers a Mind Virus that seems to have come from a lab in San Diego, California, and of his colleague, Alfred Vaz of India's External Intelligence Agency, an expert Braun quickly turns to.

The novel follows two different storylines, which gradually begin to converge. The absence of an apostrophe in the title is deliberate. Rainbows End is a 2006 near-future Science Fiction novel by Vernor Vinge.

Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge