Books
Reintroduction
By Duncan J Brown
If you’re Robert Corrigan, you awake daily to a world we created.
The sun no longer shines over London.
Unbroken clouds seep constant drizzle, turning buildings green with algae. Your mother made great sacrifices to elevate you. She taught you to be as opportunistic as the cancer that threatens to kill her. You, like most Workers, live with the threat of being demoted to non-Worker, or simply a Non. If your activity is judged subversive, you may be left without benefits or support, categorised as a Transient or worse still become one of the many disappeared.
The prospect of managing a programme like Project Egret is an opportunity you dare not turn down. You’ll face this challenge regardless of DRT’s apparent or ulterior motives. The one percent will sacrifice anything to maintain what they have and nothing you ever think or do is outside the realm of their influence. Immortality may be no more than a corporate dream but if you’re not careful you’ll awake to an even worse nightmare.
Conversion
Reintroduction Book II
By Duncan J Brown
If you’re Robert Corrigan, you’re about to be brought back against your will, if you ever had any such thing.
The world is different, the doldrums you once lived under banished and replaced by clear blue skies. The sun shines brightly over the Thames and a lush green forest dominates the ruins of London. Downloading and quarantining human-kind has proven effective from an ecological perspective but you’re alone, the only human among a new AI order. This new life offers you an inconceivable challenge: Which form of being will you convert to? Will you be human, AI or something else?
The nightmare where Workers once lived under the constant threat of demotion to non-Worker or simply a Non has been ended. No longer are those judged to be subversive left without benefits, categorised as Transients or permanently disappeared. However, the world arisen from the ashes of our downfall remains interwoven with everything we once were or aspired to be. The past casts a shadow over the present, voices echo through time and in this new world, it is impossible to avoid facing who and what you truly are. You will once again descend through layers of sediment on your journey of discovery. What you’ll find is a hell of our own making where an end is an aspiration you’re ultimately denied.
RePARATION
Reintroduction Book III
By Duncan J Brown
If you are Robert Corrigan, you may or may not be living among the grey folds of your friend Gregor’s developing human brain.
Perhaps you are nothing more than a persistent bad dream, a bit of undigested fruit? He hears you, or thinks he does; and you hear him, or think you do.
Corrigan, Gregor saw how you manipulated reality, manipulated him, making him surrender his life as an android and embrace immaturity and imperfection as a human. And now you watch as he makes his way to what was once France – your final request – with the ragged remnants of society, a traumatised gathering of androids, apes and humans, to create a new world.
Corrigan, this immature, imperfect man, ancient as a machine but still learning as a human, is better than you . . . even if he did once preside over the subjugation of the human species, reducing them to savages. You remain enthralled by him, or by the idea you have of him, even as your envy, your bitterness and your sense of worthlessness sour everything you touch. In this morbid state of mind, what end might you imagine not only for yourself but for the new world Gregor hopes to build? What reparation do you imagine? What elaborate reality will you weave now?
Corrigan, look at what you have done; what you are about to do. Life may have been unimaginably cruel for you, but will you enter Gregor’s world one more time, interfere when nothing has been asked of you, seek to make peace with your own despair through a reckless, desperate act . . . and is that not what you have always done?
Also Available
Skinning The Shadow
