Hello, I'm Kindred. (chorus) Hello, Kindred. (K) I will be sober eleventeen years and 6,213 nanoseconds from now. (chorus) polite applause.
There was this song I always listened to, you know? When I was on my own, solving crimes and staying solvent but not sober so sue me. You?
Stand with the accused if you can't accept me, READ me, I'm a novelty, get it? No? Then stand with the accused, the ones who drove me here.
Here. Joy Motel. 1968, so I thought. But Bobby Kennedy is still alive and MacRant is just a kid and Culhane drives a '59 Chevy Biscayne.
ksshh. The first letter falls, the SC teeters over HI-FI, blurring the H. I thought I was real. The future was better, right? You were there
Baldo the Magnificent, one of my DTs DTs, my DTs were so bad. Then there's your pal, Hawkwind Bulleteye. Psycho cruise ship name, you ask me
The letters keep fizzling under your watch, Baldo. PRESCHOOL HIGH FIVE GEENPOOL CYANICE kish kish kish I'd like to vie a bowel? Aye aw why?
The parrot imploded and that was my wake up call, back in bed, room 223. I looked out the window. Dick Nixon was working on the turbines.
Woke up to find Culhane's box in my bathtub. Don't remember leaving it there. Hum of turbines rattling up through the drain, pipe vibrating.
Fire axe. Got it from the glass cabinet in the hall. Nice heft, redhead. Overhand swing, accelerating downward. Wristsnap chunk. Busted box.
Paper, scraps, notes, scrolls, pads, booklets, folders, receipts, maps, bills, IOU, marriage license, love letter, death notice, house deed.
Culhane is a squirrel, hoarding life snippets. Names all different. These are not Culhane's. Must be a dozen identities here. Motherlode.
Clues and leads for the Disciples. Culhane like some kind of club secretary. The wheres and whos and whys and whens and whats. Collated.
Thumbtacks pinning everything to the west wall of 223. Floor to ceiling, overlapping pages, curled edges, all colors. Grouped and sorted.
Danko Drout, he was easy. Number six. Lethal injection behind the ear, church in Sacramento. Deedle, tougher. Hard to trace. Number three.
Got him with a parcel bomb. Watched from a rental car parked in the shade across the street. Neat little pop bang did the deed, over easy.
Kindred memorizing the wall, eyes fixed from three feet away, scanning, scrolling, shuffling across the carpet on bare feet. Drinking it in.
Four and half hours, neck aching, brainthrobbing, synapses firing in neat sequence, CIA trained mnemonic techniques, numerical shortcuts.
Brainfull mindful soulful. One last deep breath, hold it, snap, yes. All the data in Culhane's box, ingested, congested, consumed, devoured.
Turbines powering down for slumber, earth sighing, disciples dying. Dick Overtone pushed a fork into a fried egg and watched the yellow run.
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A twitter novel
The Boston Phoenix says: "Joy Motel is a microblogging book worth scrolling upward for."
Joy Motel is an unconventional sci-fi narrative that was written in real time in 140 character bursts on Twitter, the Internet's fastest-growing social networking platform.
It takes its freeform, disconnected style from the randomness of the Twitterstream itself.
This is a novel for the 21st century, captured in quick bytes by a 5-time Bram Stoker Award Finalist and a Gold Award winning adman, who are transcribing the 'brainstream' flowing inside the neural net of its lead character, Kindred.
He has unknowingly purchased an untested, corrupt brainstream from a black market uploader, which has become an uneraseable part of Kindred's persona as he grapples with an ever-shifting sense of reality, dreams that twist into nightmares, and unreliable perceptions of time and space.
At the center of his struggle, a psychiatrist he calls Psychdaddy is attempting to resolve Kindred's repressed childhood memories of the 1945 Trinity nuclear blast in New Mexico and decode his father's role in a radical collective of bomb-worshippers called the 12 Disciples.
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