Ladyflash

Amidst a traffic jam, the impatient and disconnected Claire Tourneur escapes the congestion by driving off the highway, is told by her Dashboard Computer System that she has left the Map Zone Database and is on her own, and subsequently has a couple of odd encounters; first with a pair of bank robbers (which leaves her privy to a large amount of cash and a promised cut of it) and a hitchhiker who is apparently being pursued by at least one armed party. Claire eventually discovers, after falling in love with the enigmatic fugitive, that the hitchhiker is the son of a scientist who had absconded with the working prototype from a secret research project, and multiple government agencies, and some freelance bounty hunters, are attempting to recover it. The prototype is a device for recording and translating brain impulses—a camera for the blind—and her hitchhiker is travelling the world, filming his widely-scattered family to show footage of them to his blind mother. The chase continues around the world, the nuclear satellite is shot down, causing an EMP effect that wipes out all unshielded electronics worldwide, and the characters wind up in a hidden cave in the Australian Outback, where the recordings are played back. After the death of the hitchhiker's mother, his scientist father discovers a way to use the device to record human dreams. Several of the central characters become addicted to viewing the playback of their own dreams, while Claire's estranged lover, a novelist, remains unaffected while he works on a novel about the adventure. It is this novel, ultimately, that rescues Claire from the throes of her addiction via the power of words.