Kindred Tate heroic, loinjoined offspring of Phil Kindred and Sharon Tate, spared from the slaughter by the vagaries of alternate universes.
Tate's visage adorning walls on university campuses across Slamerica. Yes, the nation sold its naming rights to a wrestling conglomerate.
Economy in the crapper, United Airlines States of Slamerica (UASS, no more USA) staggers through a dismal 2012, mouth agape at boywonder.
Tate had spun the information age on improbable vectors, opening up private restricted access netpaths for the free passage of datastreams.
Internet liberated, the giddy citizens of Slamerica sit tranfixed in front of monitors drunk on pure data, no more secrets, no more lies.
Every private database cracked open to all users, no passwords, no special invitations required, come in one and all, gorge your curiosity.
All government files accessible to anyone, income tax, health records, secret emails, corporate shenanigans, your next door neighbor's wife.
Military records, financial secrets exposed, worldwide, London, Paris, Beijing, sluicegates pouring freeblood like stentpropped arteries.
Kindred Tate doesn't care about that. What he wants is simpler. He wants to get inside his father's head. Wants a brainjack. Brainstream.
He wants his father's head inside his. Tate goes down an alley behind a butcher, offal flying out the backdoor, guts, innards and entrails.
Neon sign. Freecrack Modality. Freecrack meaning drug induced. Modality meaning a therapeutic agent, the physical treatment of a disorder.
Kindred Tate goes inside, gets into one of the red balloons. Surly attendant tells him it takes fifteen minutes to download the full deal.
Attendant wears a nametag, probably so he won't forget who he is. He has thousands, millions of brainstreams available for free public use.
The red balloon bobs gently around a white room, Tate floating inside with a goldneedle inserted into the base of his skull, icydata drip.
He is conscious, pinkly aware, the sensation rather pleasant, as his neural pathways reconfigure to align with the donor brainstream.
When the download is done, the attendant pops the red balloon and Tate crawls out, reborn in the mental image of his old man, Phil Kindred.
Tate is proud. He made brainstreams possible. The government had amassed thousands of brainfiles over the decades through secret projects.
Joy Motel was the granddaddy of them all. Countless damaged souls had cycled through its turbines, data lockedcold until Tate set it free.
Tate roams the canals of New York, his wooden boat bumping lightly against the sides of the canyon, the building faces, once great banks.
A proud city without the resources to control the rising waters of the world's oceans, water lapping second floor windows of office towers.
Tate unaware that his brainstream was not his father's. Not Phil Kindred's. The attendant had pulled a clonestream from Japan, untested.
Its label poorly translated from the Japanese, except for the name, which was boneclear. It read: Philip Kindred Dick. Philip K. Dick. PKD.
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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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