Here is book three of the saga up for your reading pleasure. At the moment, the Saga is complete.
Desperate times call for desperate measures – except what happens when those who are desperate is the enemy?
Rumors abound of a mole in his midst. Everywhere Des O’Neal turns, the enemy arises to thwart him. And with the enemy moving to dominate the station and kill civilians, Des is hard pressed to keep those he loves, safe.
The enemy is backed into a corner and nowhere near being defeated. Like a wounded lion, this aggressor is more dangerous than ever and this lion has an army.
Can Des rise to defeat the enemy or will he fail before he ever began? If you like Space Opera and Spy Thrillers, then you will love this action-packed adventure.
Grab a copy of Traitor today!
Chapter One Preview.
Amy Pond floated in the station-net of the Jov 1-H colony station. She wasn’t human, but a K class AI who had been gifted her freedom. Amy belonged to herself, allowing her to think about what she wanted to do and not just the task at hand.
She floated passed the avatars of different users. They were all humans sitting at a terminal in the real, non-Station-net world.
Amy sped past school-aged kids watching cat videos or talking with their friends. None of them saw the Station-net like she did. They saw the page and would hop from page to page. No human user saw the parts in between the different net-sites.
This was the boring parts either requiring a cybernetic implant on the human’s spine or a headset. It was also dull to the goldfish-attention-spanned humans.
Amy scanned through different channels and pages. She had access to a dozen different pages from around the net. Amy followed a few human avatars. They were people she had a specific interest in as she was spying on them.
Which was okay in her mind. She was a spy. It was her employment or task. She had permission to hunt through the private data of ordinary people if she had a logical reason to do so. The limit was severe in nature with the threat of deletion if she went against her limits.
If she could find the bad guy with the alias of Dr. Marcus Oraelius, then Des could go and get him. She wanted to stop anything terrible from happening to him or the station.
Two weeks had gone by since Des, Elsie, and herself thwarted but not stopped Oraelius’s plans. In the collapse of her old factory, they hadn’t caught anyone important. Those who were under the rubble of the ceiling had been killed.
Amy had no idea what the plans of this Oraelius person was or how to stop him. It’s like the station was infested with a virus with a multi-lateral hiding program. The infestation affected other parts of the system. She could cut and remove portions of the programming, but not find the core virus.
She tried to explain to Des how she saw things, except he hadn’t comprehended what she was talking about. Des’s older brother, Sheemo, understood.
Amy scanned the browsing history of a high school kid. He had been chatting a whole bunch about the entire long-range missile attack on the station. He was convinced it was a conspiracy by the station Commandant. She concluded the kid was harmless and bored.
She moved to another window. The woman was sixty years old and was searching for a cure to her arthritis that didn’t involve surgery or ingesting giant pills. She had stopped on a video of the market attack involving Des, Elsie, and the robots. Amy hacked all twelve of her windows closed.
Amy was pissed. It was the digital equivalent of throwing the tablet across the room. None of the leads she was watching panned out. They were ordinary people with no affiliation to anyone worth of note. Information on the Station-net was vast and led people’s attention to wander, usually when things said, “Conspiracy,” or “Cat video.”
Humans and their love of cats, Amy thought.
She knew talking to herself was a form of insanity, like trying the same thing repeatedly in the hopes of different results. However, it was in her nature to do so. Amy was confident being in sleep mode for a few hundred years had done some things to her programming.
Her consciousness was a mega-program loaded in a single piece of hardware. In her case, her chassis. Her surfing the Station-net was her loading her consciousness into the net. The act split her mind from her body. It reminded her of an ancient movie where an AI had taken over the planet earth and loaded all the human’s minds into a computer program. Except to make the example correct, she would have to be a human, which was a lousy pathway for an AI to follow.
The last thing an AI needed in her programming was cognitive dissonance or being of two minds about something. Amy understood humans did it all the time. Their programming was better than even hers and could handle the paradoxes.
Amy couldn’t handle the split. It’s what caused AIs to go crazy in the past. The history of humans in space was filled with AI disasters where some AI went mad and tried to kill all humans.
She scanned the different windows, seeing if any of the nearby human avatars was doing anything noteworthy to spy on. Then she saw it. Off to one side, she saw a faint glimmer. A single light of an avatar. It was one of many avatars streaming around, except this one was different. Most avatars zipped by to the next page. This one hovered in space as if whoever it was could see her. Thoughts whirled through her programming, none of them positive.
“Hello,” Amy said.
The avatar blinked out. The user either logged out or had gone incognito. Amy wasn’t sure which, but it left a faint coded afterimage.
Amy zipped through the space toward it. She needed to get closer to the image for her to see what or who it was. Amy neared the fading image, getting close to see the picture, but not the code. It was the code she was interested in. Images could be changed over and over. They meant nothing to her.
She neared the fading code, but most of it was illegible. She saw a faint portion of it, which she recognized the coding. It was of similar design to herself. Amy saved the image of it and logged out.
Ones and zeros flew past her vision as she zipped out of the net. There was always a chance a bug could trap her in the net. She had no intention of being lost in the Station-net. Being in sleep mode for a few hundred years was long enough.
Amy’s consciousness flew into her chassis with a digital thud.
Atomic Slingshot Press 