The genesis of this project began way back in 2004. Working as a corporate audio-visual technician, I spent countless hours immersed in the monotony of conferences and business meetings. Yet amidst the droning presentations, PowerPoint slides, and corporate jargon, a thought occurred to me: What if some of these corporate cats around me—with their calculated charm, scheming minds, and ruthless ambition—were indeed genuine gangsters and pirates?
I couldn’t shake the idea. How would they navigate the corporate world if their predatory instincts were stripped of metaphor and turned literal? What economic and societal conditions could spawn such a breed of corporate marauder?
This idea became the seed of my creative journey. Initially, I wrote a draft script for a short film. It was sharp, edgy, and self-contained—a brief exploration of my questions in a fictional setting. But then I made a critical mistake: I tried to flesh it out into a feature film. Somehow, during that process, the story took on a life of its own. What had begun as a concise screenplay evolved into a sprawling narrative with characters, subplots, and a world that demanded exploration far beyond the limitations of the medium.
Soon, I realized a screenplay wasn’t enough. The constraints of filmmaking—from the production challenges to the near-impossible odds of seeing an indie film project through to completion—made me face a hard truth: this story would likely never be made and, therefore, never find an audience. I needed to free the story from these constraints. And so began my long odyssey: I turned to prose and started writing a novel.
The process was anything but straightforward. This book wasn’t written in one cohesive timeline or under ideal conditions. Instead, it came together piece by piece, fragment by fragment, written on notepads, scraps of paper, the backs of receipts, desktops, laptops, and smartphones of every brand and era. Over the years, I stored parts of the story on hard drives, miniSD cards, and in clouds. Entire technological innovations came and went during this time, and my scattered drafts bore witness to the relentless march of progress.
I wrote wherever and whenever I could. On trains to work. During work. Late at night under the bed covers. Even in the hazy moments of dreams within dreams, the story lingered, demanding to be written. The characters wouldn’t let me rest, their voices growing louder and clearer as the years passed.
What started as a simple exercise in imagination evolved into a deep exploration of power, corruption, and the societal systems we both serve and resist. By answering my inciting questions, I uncovered new ones, and the act of trying to answer them shaped the world of my novel. What emerged was a vision of a near future—a world loathsomely familiar, unwelcome, divisive, and yet undeniably plausible. This is a story of economic warfare, unchecked ambition, and the grim consequences of systems built on exploitation.
Now, as I stand at the end of this long creative journey, I can only hope the story resonates with readers the way it has lived within me all these years. It’s a cautionary tale, a speculative mirror held up to the worst of our instincts and the systems we’ve built to serve them. But more than that, it’s a story about survival, resistance, and the question of whether humanity can find its way back from the brink of self-destruction.
This novel is my unbroken promise to that initial spark of an idea back in 2004. And to everyone who has ever stared at the world around them and wondered, What if?…
