About Hard Reset - a New Short Story
WritingI've made a new short story available on the Downloads page called Hard Reset.
It's about 13,000 words. So longer than the others. And it's the story I wrote after completing my first novel.
I got into cyberpunk after re-reading William Gibson's Neuromancer. What a great novel. But, I have to say, it's not an easy read. The prose is dense and layered. The storyline wanders around like a lost soul. And then there's all the tech references.
But...
I thought: I like that. Because cyberpunk is dark and grim. Nobody wins. It's survival against the corporations. And the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to give it a go.
I sat down to write a cyberpunk novel of my own. and 20 days and 90,000 words later, I'd done it. Blame the hyper-focus on my PTSD.
What I'd ended up with was a sort of noir thriller with a cyberpunk flavour. But still. I wrote the novel.
So, a little while after that, I started playing with idea for one of the characters. Riku Kimura, an ex-soldier turned mercenary in Chiba City, Japan.
I thought it might be another novel. But the idea was compact enough to be a short story. It took me three evenings to write it. And I've since put it together as an ePub so you can have a read.
Here's the blurb for it:
Most ex-soldiers live quietly. Riku Kimura just quit his corporate security job to go back to war.
When a chance encounter with a razorgirl pulls him into a conspiracy, Riku discovers MedTech Corporation is flooding Chiba's streets with fake yakuza—prisoners given chrome and turned into expendable enforcers. Their mission: crush the black market clinics that threaten corporate profits.
Dr. Hana Saito runs one of those clinics. She charges what people can afford, which makes her MedTech's primary target.
Riku knows how to handle problems like this. He's a veteran of the corporate wars with mil-spec augmentations and decades of experience. Along with a genius netrunner, a loyal yakuza clan, and a maintenance worker with more courage than sense, he's got everything he needs.
Except a way in.
The solution? An EMP device small enough to fit in a shoulder bag. A sensorium link so he can ride along while it's planted. And the willingness to accept that when you reset chrome-dependent enforcers, some of them don't reboot.
In 2040's Chiba City, corporations own the law and chrome is power.
Riku Kimura is about to shut it all down.
A standalone cyberpunk thriller.
You can download it here
