Year of the Dog

Year of the Dog

An excerpt from the book “The Blood Ring.”

“I’m gonna feed you to the dogs,” said Fred Greenway brandishing a cleaver. He brought it down and cut into the young punk’s thigh.

Doctor Gus flinched even though he’d seen this a hundred times. Having taken a Lava pill, his brain perceived the high-def images on the screen as real. The narco-psychotic was formulated to assist with augmented reality training. Mindject users take the drug to help them form neurological pathways inside their heads so they can perceive artificial imagery or sound. Ingested without a mindjector, Lava forced visceral emotions to merge with one’s logic. The end result is exhilarating for some users, and terrifying for others.

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Offshore

This flash fiction piece took out the inaugural Punk Out: Wattpunk Contests and Prompt challenge.


As the electrical generator housing was hit with a deafening crash, the entire offshore installation was jolted with a sudden, violent force that reverberated through the metal structure. The lights flickered and then went out completely, leaving the interior quarters in pitch darkness. The installation manager, who had been monitoring the situation from his control room, felt his heart sink as he saw the screens go blank and the alarms fall silent.

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The Mango Tree

The Mango Tree

An excerpt from the book “The Blood Ring.”


Steve Bastione believed he was a reasonable man. He did not consider himself an animal; a savage from the north coast slums. Sure, the Black Dragons were infamous for their brutal ways, but things had changed. Fame and fortune had opened a new frontier for the little-known group of drug dealers. Overnight, they become celebrities. They were entrepreneurs in charge of a savvy business machine, selling gang-related paraphernalia to the masses. The textile trade didn’t deliver as much cash as distributing narco-psychotics, however, the legitimate enterprises did give the Black Dragons avenues to launder the income.

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Yellowcop is Everywhere.

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.

Enter The Dendro

Sublevel

Narkvosu just wanted to survive.

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.

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Scumhackers

An excerpt from the book “The Blood Ring.

“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.

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Dead Drop Society

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.

*first appeared on Wattpad

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.

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Flash Gordon Saves the Universe

Flash Gordon Poster

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.

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Ice Hangar

This short story won 1st prize on TheNextBigWriter → Locked Door Contest


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.

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Sell Outs

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?

You would say this is ridiculous paranoia.

I’d say this process has already started.