J Bock

Caroline J Bock

A riveting near-future science fiction thriller. A glimpse into an all too plausible future from the eyes of a man just trying to get to a drink at the end of his day.

The political divide in the old United States has grown wide enough to create new borders, and three new countries, but Levi Pickering is more concerned about surviving the next round of layoffs. His job at the Energy Alliance has been great. He's got a nice trailer up the mountain from the company town and normally, he has enough scrip for a trip or two to the bar each week. He's also got friends and a boss that doesn't micromanage. Even that cute girl in IT is giving him signals. He thinks.

But the natural gas on campus is drying up, and more jobs are lost to automation every day. When the AI-fortified control systems that govern every operation on campus are hacked, the same pipelines Levi designed years ago rain fire onto his home, workplace and the people he's come to care about. He needs to mourn, but with his digital signature found on the commands that issued the campus-wide destruction, Levi's been branded a terrorist. While evading the Energy Alliance's private militarized law enforcement, he must find proof of his innocence or he'll surely be hung.

Caroline's presentation in an imaginative atmosphere that is as much of a character as the humans navigating it. Its initial setting in near-future West Virginia makes the novel a thought experiment on how real, meticulously-researched emerging technologies could affect the lives of those living in a part of America that is often forgotten, and for better or worse, more relevant now than ever.