It can see and hear everything. It can track where you are in the physical world and what you do in the virtual one. This panoptic surveillance network is legal and built into in every electronic device, gadget or machine that comes off the factory floor, from robot trashcans to autonomous smartcars.
Anonymity is officially dead, that is until the advent of the DENDROS, a quasi-sentient computer algorithm that hacks into all machines spanning the Global Internet of Things.
Peer-to-peer, un-hackable, untraceable and totally cryptonymous, humanity can go back to indulging in its dark side — incognito and free.
Characters
Heidi Matthews is a Missing Persons Unit detective, re-assigned to the Sheepdog Unit, a team of law enforcers dedicated to bringing down the snuff industry. All she needs to do is put aside her animosity towards its unscrupulous leader and help the Sheepdogs put an end to the pandemic of violence.
Luke Pearson is a snuff aficionado who is always one step ahead of the law. Always a suspect but never an accused, his luck may be just about to run out.
Eddie, John and Francoise have broken out of the Psychomax. To stay free all they have to do is keep doing what they do best, and the underground snuff market pays more that anything in the world.
Mark Forrester’s day turns sour when he comes across a stolen pango, a personal area network device that runs all the technology crammed into everyday life. Within the pango, he uncovers evidence of a horrific, insidious crime perpetrated by a sinister snuff group known as the Blood Ring.
But Mark cannot go to the police, for he suspects that the Yellow Monster, which feeds daily on human villainy, may not be interested in justice at all.
At least long enough to complete his quest. He could care less about ever returning to his home city. Alone, he explored the last obstacle to his journey, an ancient cavern carved out long ago. Concrete and steel are now dust. Bedrock exposed. Nothing remained, the running creek, the moister and gangumoss making short work of what was once probably a vast urban habitation. If one could not define any of the telltale signatures of a past civilisation, the sub-level appeared just like a long natural cave.
“Did ya reset that last Pango before you sold it to the girl?” asked Martin while urinating, standing upright behind a mound of garbage. She finished, pulled up her pants and strolled over to where Rico sat.
Rico surveyed the laneway situated adjacent to the B line train tracks and intersecting South Valley Road. The thoroughfare was nothing more than an illegal dumping ground among a forest of weeds. “Why the fuck would I wanna do that?” responded Rico, sitting down on the broken pavement and picking at a hole in his dirty pants. “Fuck, I’m hungry.
At the moment, Amazon’s KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) dominates the eBook publishing landscape like a tyrannical despot. They control over 70% of the eBook market, and punish you (via KDP Select) if you list your book on some other platform. They charge a premium for you to market and advertise on their platform – a spend of $100 will barely get you one sale, and if you get a sale, they’ll pay you a fraction of that sale depending on how many pages are read.
That’s it for authors. If you’re not on Amazon, you’re wasting your time.
A few years ago, hope of a better system appeared in the form of blockchain technology. As Bitcoin made inroads into commerce a few avenues appeared for authors. Most were buy and sell services offering sales for products in exchange for Bitcoins. Looking back at all my accounts most are now all extinct, Bitbooks.cc being the most notable one. (I received a small tip from there once, that’s now worth $500) But nothing since has been developed that could be useful for authors.
Until now.
This ICO revolution powered by Etherium has for the first time since the Amazon Revolution in the 90’s offered writers and reader a possible new paradigm for not only books, but for music and films as well. Decentralisation is key. Screw the middle man. Self publishing is about bypassing the traditional publishers and connecting with reader directly. Yet Amazon is the behemoth Third Party Entity on the web that no author, established or not, can circumvent.
Decentralisation = Hope.
I won’t go into the technical details of how Ethereum and contracts work, I’m still learning the process, but I will list a few application that I’ve come across that seem promising if they actually deliver on what they say they can.
Authorship
First up, Authorship. This ICO is (at time of writing) currently offered. Based on the Ethereum platform
“Authorship is one such decentralized platform that aims to redefine the world of books by connecting authors, translators, publishers and readers on a single platform.”
They will be issuing tokens described as …
Authorship Token. The ATS, an ERC-20 token based on the Ethereum technology, is a unit of exchange on a new Blockchain based book publishing system. Authors, publishers and translators are rewarded with ATS tokens in exchange to book sales, while readers are able to spend ATS tokens in order to purchase books.
The flow chart is a little complex, but from what I understand it still involves traditional publishing platforms. Without some kind of application or prototype to use it’s hard to tell how useful or effective this could be.
Publica
Next up is Publica, it’s ICO is in a month or so. They are a little clearer on what kind of model they want to establish and their flow chart is a tiny bit less converluted.
Publica describes itself as..
a platform for authors, readers, books of all kinds and the people who make them. And for smart contracts to carry all kinds of transactions and exchanges for the publishing economy.
As for token Publica will be using their own cryptocurrency.
Publica-the-country has no national debt. It exports more products and services than it imports. It doesn't print new money. In an economist's terms, its money supply is fixed and therefore stable for the long run. Within its borders, Publica's internal money is a token called PBL.
Others.
Again, without a working model it’s difficult to tell how this will work.
There’s Po.et. – a shared, universal ledger designed to track ownership and attribution for the world's digital creative assets.
They have a testnet online so I’ve been playing around with it. Still no way of telling how this can be useful.
One app that has caught my eye is Musicoin. Even though a music portal, this model and format if used for an ebook, is potentially an author’s dream distribution network. What Musicoin lacks, however, is the ability for promotion. If they can introduce a way to allow an artist to offer incentives for consumers to sample their work, this kind of business model could take off, astronomically.
For established authors, an ebook model similar to Musicoin could free them from third parties altogether. For new authors, a decentralised/crypto portal where writers can promote themselves by offering incentives for readers to sample their work, who can use the tokens to then go and buy full works, this could be the catalyst that ends Amazon’s reign of terror.
In the 1990’s freeware had revolutionised marketing for software creators, and free betas are used today to test and market games and so on. As a writer, something like a eBook version of Musicoin, that allows for incentives for sampling content, can be a game changer, far greater than the Print on Demand concept from over a decade ago.
If there are new decentralised publishing models out there, I would be certainly interested in road testing them.
When access to the internet and information becomes inaccessible to a vast majority of the population, dead drop networks spring up everywhere. But someone needs to maintain this free access to information, otherwise, the population remains mired in ignorance and cut out of the wealth cycle.
Mateus Fiel knew of the fierce territorialism between rival scanbob gangs in the area. He chose to ignore it, the score proving too lucrative to pass up. Venturing outside of his home exurb constituted a risk. Many did so to engage in leisure activities, and many more did so for business opportunities. Mateus did it for both reasons, so he considered the risk he took this time around as absolutely justified.
When Flash Gordon was ‘again’ resurrected back (thanks, Princess Aura for the first time) into pop culture by Seth MacFarlane in his film, Ted (2013), I was filled with bemusement and joy. Ever since that day, walking home from school and coming across the giant movie billboard, Mike Hodges’s Flash Gordon has remained doggedly on my top ten list of favourite movies.
Why?
For three decades I felt alone being a fan of this movie. Mention it at film school and people would look at me as if something was fundamentally wrong with my brain. I remember critics panning it at the time, much to my dismay. They were worried about cardboard characters and cardboard sets. Again, to my utter dismay.
The ephemeris data seemed healthy enough. The storm, on the other hand, ripping across space from the comet’s horizon, appeared hazardous. Transiting through the comet’s coma the shuttle vibrated slightly. Carl Reagle knew the outgassing from the bright side lacked enough violence to cause any serious problems. The comet had just emerged from out of the frost line, so the sun’s rays were not harsh enough to feed a fully-fledged tail.
What if I were to tell you that a vast galactic civilisation exists, much older than ours and that this space-faring society was a great consumer of things such as art, food and resources…
…that we Earthlings are a newly discovered delicacy and that a vast market waits?
Is this a bad eventuality for mankind or a good one? If a taste for humans takes off, if this becomes more than just a fad, to feed such a vast market, how many billions of people would need to be exported to meet such demand? Billions more would be required to be bred to sustain supply. Humanity will eventually be farmed on other planets across galaxies.
A shortcut for humanity to spread across the stars, yes?
What if I were to tell you that the wretched and corrupt among us were to abandon resistance and flock to these new overlords, selling out their fellow humans in a mad scramble to secure their own individual survival, to carve out their own suzerainty over the helpless, clueless majority?
A while ago, after finishing my novel A Hostile Takeover, I took on adapting my screenplay ‘The Bad Samaritan’ into my next book project. It turned out to be an ordeal, with convoluted plots ending up driving me insane, but in the end I had myself a completed draft.
The early eighties were remarkable, to me anyhow. Not only did my fascination with science fiction grind into high gear, but there was an explosion of new and modern genre films that hit the scene at around that time, in particular, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner many having been influenced by film-makers from a bygone era, and more importantly, by novels penned by hardcore science fiction authors, such as Philip K Dick, just a decade earlier.
