And yet, there he had it. On a hillside overlooking unrealities of black & white & the ghosts of radio star suicides. The earliest dooms.
Earstream begat eyebeam begat brainstream, couldn't anybody wait at all? Why the rush to die? K Tate heard a shuffling sound. A man, a limp.
Shadowed by the sign, the man grasped young K's unclenched hand, Cheshire cat grin. Son of Kindred exhaled as he came to his feet. The grin.
Then the shadowman inhaled, a bakery breath. K Tate saw the red and blue dots around his nostrils dance, a sign of long time netdopes. Shit.
Eyelids flapfluttered, adrenaline gone. Memories not his own taken dots and dashes html codex www nevernet the eye shivering in his fist.
Sinuses drained of thought. The man thanked him, told him he would take the information to his usability lab, weigh the balances now/future.
Shadow man with thin tie (K Tate now saw) kicked out, hold the eyeball hold it, now rolling downhill a freefall into the dark night water.
Fall. A waterfall. K Tate stared up at a drainage pipe, Hell's Kitchen 2012. Open hand slow, eye dry, whew. Night dawned on him then. Swift.
Would Eye ever tell him what had happened, what had changed? Could two eyes exist at once? Was his past changed before the clonebirthing?
He sat there as the sun rose, knowing he might never know. Liberty's head bobbed southward, spikes piercing Freedom Tower. More deaths.
Inland, gotta get inland where the waterrise ebbs and midwestern sunbakes furrowed farmland dry from rising floodwaters of melted icecaps.
K Tate ferrybound westward through Pennsylvania, hulking mining towns gone graysmokedead as the whiteboat puttered upriver, dwindling now.
Finally aground with a scraping hull, K Tate disembarked at the water's edge and took a last look back eastward, fallen hope of urbanworld.
Tired freighttrain lumbering, a steelwheeled packhorse crammed with desperate settlers from Wall Street, torn white shirts waving surrender.
K Tate with no map, fueled by a sense of destiny, homing pigeon zeroing in on Ruralia, Iowa, home of the serverfarm codenamed RedGandalf23.
Debarked the train at a sadwhistlestop, fatigue-etched upfaces of unemployed merchant bankers seeking salvation, watching him go on foot.
RedGandalf23 emitted so much rawdata into the air, from a distance it bent the horizon, lightwaves from the mothersun warping in bluehaze.
The massive serverfarm could be heard before it could be seen, could be felt before it could be understood, pulsing deepboom sonic reverb.
Filled the air with information at a subatomic level, gradation so fine it penetrated the pores, infiltrated the skin, uberneural as Xrays.
All the zeroes in the netPipe arrayed in a straight line (nilmarker) like 3 lemons in Vegas and data flows so freely it becomes airborne.
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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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