When a group of teenage gamers get shaken down by some local thugs, they decide to test their team skills on the real world. But will they manage to turn their neighbourhood back into a safe place again, when the local gang has kidnapped their friend, when their own inexperience is a threat to their lives, and when their involvement brings in more unwanted attention?
Meet the boys (and a girl)
Detroll is the chief. His hobbies include gaming, strategising and confronting trolls on the internet. Hellbovine is a PVP addict. A second-generation player-vs-player gamer that has taken up his father’s legacy and wants to climb the gaming charts. Ambassador is a sweet kid who works at his father’s gyro place. Zodovolo is pretty much their mascot. And Crazy Iva is the girl they never expected having on their guild (hence the sons naming). But no-one dares call her girl to her face, lest they get their nose bitten off.
We are on a path towards an interconnected world. Self-driving cars are already here, the tech for smarthouses exists but there are no standards yet, and people are finding creative ways to use smartphone apps in their daily lives.
Don’t worry, he always looks stressed like that.
The following is a direct quote from a Mr. Robot episode:
There’s a saying — ‘The devil is at his strongest while we’re looking the other way.’ Like a program running in the background silently. While we’re busy doing other shit. ‘Daemons,’ they call them. They perform action without user interaction. Monitoring, logging, notifications, primal urges, repressed memories, unconscious habits. They’re always there, always active. You can try to be right, you can try to be good, you can try to make a difference. But it’s all bullshit. ‘Cause intentions are irrelevant. They don’t drive us, daemons do. And me? I’ve got more than most.
Though he is using daemons as an allegory to our primal urges, the fact remains that they are similar things. As computer daemons become more and more complex, as we surrender more and more power over the real world to them, they will start having behaviors. Personalities even. How often do you have a computer that seems to have a mind of its own? This is due to our tendency to find patterns where there are none, to be honest, but some day, it will actually be true. Through complexity we will find intelligence. Emergent behaviors.
In the story Nanodaemons, I have tried to imagine the tasks of a group of daemons, that form a PAN (Personal Area Network). We already have PANs, even though we don’t really know it. A fitness tracker that connects to our cellphone and a bluetooth headset, is exactly that. A personal short range network of interconnected devices, that communicate between them to fit our needs. If you add some more to the mix, like smartclothing and a Hololens or Google Glass, you can see how that freaky cyberpunk story I made up is not really that far ahead.
Evil hands
To my joy, I stumbled on the TV series Limitless, the Arm-ageddon episode, where their villain of the week has hacked a bunch of prosthetic cyberarms and ended up in many crimes and one murder. The episode’s weight was more on the man behind it, but it was great seeing how a silly sci-fi crime like that actually makes it into an otherwise realistic show. It only goes to show that people at large are beginning to accept that there are serious security issues with those things, and that we need to get some smart people together in a room to figure it out. People need these prosthetics, and we need them to be secure and high-tech, but also comfortable and discreet.
Yeah, ok, his arm puns were better than mine. I admit it.
Meet the Daemons
In Nanodaemons, the arm is only part of the problem. And part of the solution, as you’ll see. Not to spoil anything, but there is a guy, being framed for murder. The story is about him trying to figure out what happened, and the unusual case of eudaemonia that afflicts him.
So, is it actually going to make our lives better? A Googler says it will create more profound means of expression. Maybe it will. Maybe we will evolve new ways to feel stuff, additional nuances to our communication between people. The internet is already changing the way we remember stuff. I see it myself all the time. If I can google it, then I don’t really need to remember it. We seem to like how things are going, it doesn’t scare us. How long till we actually plug a handy Brain-Computer-Interface that plugs some memories to a cloud?
We have began a new partnership with StoryCartel. You can get Crying Over Spilt Light over there for free for a few more days. After that, an honest review is appreciated.
Don’t Cry Little Guy…
Why such a big deal on reviews?
Reviews make sure people see what other readers have thought of the book. Those little stars have a big impact on readers searching for something new. Sure, you know what a Stephen King novel might read like, or you have some expectations for the new Harry Potter novels, but when a writer is not well known he needs all the help he can get.
Reviews can be short, don’t think of them as critic’s bylines. Just write down what you thought of the story, if it moved you, if you wanna read more. Click the star rating. And submit. Simple as that.
Where should I review books?
Anywhere you like. To be honest, the ones that make the biggest difference to us are the Amazon reviews and the Goodreads ones.
OK, it’s not that they don’t like me, it’s rather like they don’t hit on me.
Ever. Never ever.
I mean, I don’t get what I’m doing wrong. I have my relationship status set to single and everything. My height doesn’t help either. I’m five percent short of two meters. But that’s not the worst part. The absolute frickin worst is my nickname.
Loveless Ada.
My name is Adelaide, so it was bound to get mocked at school.
Hard.
My parents shortened it to Ada at an early age.
Then they went up and died.
That reduced the total number of people who love me on planet earth, to zero.
Okay, one.
My yiayia, that’s my grandmother, is the only person left who still loves me.
Just a bit.
Technically.
Out of need.
She is like ninety eight years old and part-Robocop. Whatever empathy she might have had is gone over the decades. She is like a squeezed version of a human, where you take out the squishy feely stuff and leave a bag of bones behind, lubricated by spit and bile.
I know you’d think that my yiayia loves me deep down, and that she is just like all other lovin’ and carin’ cookie-making machines in the world.
Well, she does not. She calls me by my nickname, which I hate.
So, back to my nickname. It was at school, thirteen years old. I was bullied all day long by this boy Chris. Chris was obnoxious, smelly, and hit all kids at school. He liked me better, which is to say he hit me the most. I was an expert at avoiding him at all times, but in some cases he remembered all about me and eventually he would find me and torture me.
He’d steal my lunch. He’d throw dirt on my hair. He’d make fun of me, pointing his greasy finger at me and the rest of the bully-posse would laugh at me.
Chris was the bane of my existence during my childhood.
It didn’t help that I was beginning to grow much taller than him.
If Chris was nasty before, then after my growth spurt he acted as if it was his legal obligation to bully me. The mere heights of my adolescence were threatening his street-cred, even though I had done nothing to provoke him. I crouched to lessen my frame, I avoided him, I made sure never to look down on him.
It didn’t matter. Chris hated my guts. My tall, leaning over him guts.
I had discovered Ada Lovelace at that time. She was my hero. A countess from a century long forgotten, the very first computer programmer. I wanted to be her, I simply adored her.
The teacher asked for our role models, what kind of work we wanted to do when we’d grown up. That ill-fated moment, I raised my hand and said, “I want to be a computer programmer, like Ada Lovelace.”
Chris misheard the name and mocked, “Loveless? You wanna be Ada Loveless for the rest of your life? Hahaha!” And they laughed. Even the teacher cracked up a bit before she demanded silence.
Boom. It stuck.
Since then I’m loveless.
Ada Loveless.
Do you want to know what’s next for the virgin computer nerd? Do you wanna meet the nasty Yiayia?
Join the Mythographers and be the first to learn all about Ada!
This real scientific breakthrough uses physical honeycomb constructs to bend light, whereas Yanni, our bright but poor physicist in the novella attempts to use Maxwell’s light knots.
It is available on Amazon, Kobo and Smashwords (if they ever get around to publishing it).
As always, this is a story about the god complex, the drive of a man to prove himself immortal. In this case by taking a place in scientific history, and why not, a Nobel prize?
And alas, there was a really cool problem to go along with it!
Crystallized light had two inherent problems, one being leaking and two, due to quantum effects, being destroyed by the very act of observation. I don’t know of course if the real problem is at all solvable, but for my novella, it is. Yanni, the physicist is working on a solution to keep the light contained on its lattice.
Years pass with no end in sight, until he is dealt an ultimatum by the review board of his funding (Deimokritos is the National Centre of Scientific Research) and he needs to figure out the solution to his proof fast. Yanni is only 30 years old, but he has convinced himself that unless he manages to make a breakthrough before his birthday, he will never do so. 30 years old might seem too young but in academic age it borders on going senile. The mind simply cannot work at the same capacity it did, especially regarding theoretical physics and advanced mathematics. It is well known that academic brilliance takes a downturn after 25. Yanni, living in this institution used to be one of the young brilliant minds to mock the elders and is frightened by seeing himself turn into one.
His idea is that it is possible to use Maxwell’s light knots to solve the leaking light problem from light crystals, enabling quantum computing with previously unimaginable computing speeds. It is all years ahead of course, but it is easy to imagine a tech company willing to kill for such a breakthrough.
Render of a possible light knot based on Maxwell’s equations.
Where does the Muse fit into all of this?
Well, the muse is an android specially created to aid the inspiration of her charge. I don’t want to spoil anything so I’ll just explain this with broad strokes: She is an android, a fantasy come true, the Muse and the wife and the companion who knows what to say, when to say it, who lets you work uninterrupted, who tends to your needs and eliminates all distractions.
Her form was dictated by common sci-fi imagery of gynoids, but her pose (and this is something I am quite happy discovering) comes from the following classic painting:
Luigi Cherubini and the Muse of Lyric Poetry
It is simply amazing to realize that every concept, every combination, every single slice of life you can possibly think of has already been visualized in classic art.
It is hard to discuss about anything more without spoiling the book, so I’ll just leave it at that and hope it piques your interest. It is available on Amazon.
Do you want to get emailed as soon as we have something new, to get free stories and to see cool stuff as we release them? Then click the button below and join the Mythographers:
Erinyes (known as Furies in Roman Latin) are three goddess avengers of the crimes of murder, unfilial conduct, impiety and perjury. They recently discovered selfies as well.
Yes, mythical creatures now have their own Twitter profiles. Feel free to follow her, if you dare.
In the story Erinyes, Mahi is a self-adoring teenager who, just like most teenagers these days, only cares about the amount of likes and retweets that she gets on her (admittedly hot) selfie pics.
Mahi notices something strange in her latest selfies.
The entity she notices on her selfies is becoming more and more solid, until it actually starts chasing her non-stop. That entity is Erinyes, and she chases her victims precisely every 109 minutes for one frantic minute of intense manhunt. Along with her friend, Deppy, a remarkably tech-savvy girl in her cutesy personality, and the enigmatic Prodromos, a conspiracy-theorist rebel hacker, Mahi has to find out the truth behind an insane corporate conspiracy while Erinyes is following her. Possibly forever.
Hello you. Yes, you. You are a Mythographer. But who are you exactly?
All who want to change the world, raise hands.
They say that when you write you need to envision your ideal reader. To come up with the traits that make up the perfect person for whom who are writing and who will judge, love, treasure your books and anxiously wait for more.
So I decided to come up with my ideal reader. Soon to become viewer as well, because we have some movie projects in post-production.
I will call you a Mythographer, because “ideal reader” is clunky.
Now, this is not in any way perfect and I expect things to change. But I want to give it a try at least.
First of all, you are European.
And by European I don’t necessarily mean coming from Europe, but rather having the qualities many Europeans have. You are multilingual, at least bilingual. You appreciate history and culture because you come from a country which borders people with similar powerful cultural histories. You are an inventor, you want to know how that thingamajiggy works! You are an explorer, even if your life circumstances allow it only via reading. The explorer trait stuck with me when viewing the Rosetta mission update, in which a scientist said that Europeans are explorers at heart. It’s true.
Secondly, you like science fiction.
You don’t necessarily have a science degree, but you love reading about space and lightsabers and aliens and marvelous machines. You love the characters who live in such a world daily, fighting towards a higher goal. Honestly, our myths are not that hard sci-fi (which means very plausible and with well defined scientific limitations), so it should be easy for a layman to follow most of the tech involved. But there is always a priority to make the science fiction make sense, so usually it involves real, hard sci-fi.
You have a critical mind.
You might notice that a prominent feature of our work has to do with gods. In case it’s not clear from the general “God Complex” title we have slapped all over everything, these are false gods. They think they are gods. They delude themselves, their megalomania being the driving force behind every story. And so, the theme is “Corporations get a god complex” but really, to tell a human story we must focus on humans. So, what can a man with a god complex do, when he has the power of a corporation? Think about it. Just like “1984”, this is a warning, not a manual.
You do not get hung up in genre.
Our works are genre-hopping by default. One is a thriller for quarter-life crisis, the other is a young adult mystery, the next is an action bloody mess. They are all encompassed by the general theme of science fiction, light cyberpunk and Greek mythology. Also, something that surprises many people is that we are also doing video production. We have in store a few short movies and planning to complete a feature length movie soon. We have an idea for a comic book if we find the right artist. I know some people say, “Oh, I read only murder-mysteries” and things like that. You are not a mythographer then, sorry. Move along.
You want to change the world.
You are a creator, a maker, an artist, a writer, anything. He who does not create, only destroys. That is my personal mantra and I believe that my ideal reader will think like that as well.
You do not mind a healthy dose of blood and sperm.
Yes, you read that correctly. Ancient Greek drama is bloody and sexy as hell. Modern classics are all filled with healthy doses of sex and violence. Everything must be in moderation. Profanity is a part of life. A character getting shot in the leg and yelling “Gosh damn it!” is unrealistic and comical. A person, when hurt, will swear. A lot. A fuck-ton. If you take out the violence and blood from a story that should have them front and centre, you end up with a downward spiral like the Die-Hard pentalogy.
You want to support the type of entertainment you love.
We don’t mind if you pirate one thing, or gather only the freebies during our many promotions. We need you at some point to say, here, I like what you are doing, take my $2.99 for the next thing. Also ideally, you need to write a quick review at anyplace you prefer. It will help greatly. Because, in the end, if you don’t support what you love, no one will. There will be no more coming of the thing you love. Every time you buy a book from us, you make the next one happen.
This is by no means exhausting, it’s just a little thought exercise. If by any change you are a mythographer but are very different from the things I write here, go ahead and prove me wrong in the comments.
If you want to join us, get on the mailing list to get your mythographer’s stamp of approval.
It offers a chilling perspective that I believe was the core of my main idea for this book. Having it right at the start sets the tone for the rest of the path.
The gods are back in town. Skyscrapers pop out of nowhere all around Athens. Corporations rename themselves as Greek gods. It all started with the Greek crisis of 2009 and it will forever change the world as we know it. Some say that CEO’s have gone mad. Others, that they know damn well what they are doing. That there is something solid amongst the myth. In the day of inter-connectivity and social media admiration, can the ancient myths come back to life?
The gods are back in town and they carry a god complex.
When the score of a lifetime falls in their lap, Deimos and his team accepts to sneak in a factory and 3D print the client’s secret design. But will they succeed when a pack of well trained Amazons tries to stop them, when things don’t quite go as planned and when the secret design turns out to be something very different?
