Artificial
by Jadah McCoy
Published
by: Curiosity Quills Press
Publication
date: April 4th 2016
Genres:
New Adult, Science Fiction
Synopsis:
She struggles to feel
human.
In 2256, the only remnants
of civilization on Earth’s first colonized planet, Kepler, are the
plant-covered buildings and the nocturnal, genetically spliced
bug-people nesting within them: the Cull. During the day, Syl leaves
her home in the sewers beneath Elite City to scavenge for food, but
at night the Cull come looking for a meal of their own. Syl thought
gene splicing died with the Android War a century ago. She thought
the bugs could be exterminated, Elite city rebuilt, and the
population replenished. She’s wrong.
Whoever engineered the
Cull isn’t done playing God. Syl is abducted and tortured in
horrific experiments which result in her own DNA being spliced,
slowly turning her into one of the bugs. Now she must find a cure and
stop the person responsible before every remaining man, woman, and
child on Kepler is transformed into the abomination they fear.
He struggles not to.
For Bastion, being an
android in the sex industry isn’t so bad. Clubbing beneath the
streets of New Elite by day and seducing the rich by night isn’t an
altogether undesirable occupation. But every day a new android
cadaver appears in the slum gutters, and each caved in metal skull
and heap of mangled wires whittles away at him.
Glitches—androids with
empathy—are being murdered, their models discontinued and strung up
as a warning. Show emotion, you die. Good thing Bastion can keep a
secret, or he would be the next body lining the street.
He can almost live with
hiding his emotions. That is, until a girl shows up in the slums—a
human girl, who claims she was an experiment. And in New Elite, being
a human is even worse than being a Glitch. Now Bastion must help the
girl escape before he becomes victim to his too-human emotions, one
way or another.
Purchase:
EXCERPT
Bastion
A sign hangs over
the body, its mangled wires spilling out of the faux flesh, limbs at
an unnatural angle. There’s a crater bashed in the lightweight
steel skull that droops against its dented chest. The metal that
creates our bodies is hardy stuff—it took some force to put those
marks there, some real disgust behind those blows.
The sign above the
mecha corpse reads “Death to Glitches.”
I keep my face
carefully neutral as I pass the scene, dodging hovercrafts as they
zip by. A few fellow androids gather around, as they always do when a
new cadaver joins the others in the gutter.
Bitterness hardens
my eyes, tenses my brow and jaw. No, no. That won’t do at all.
To show remorse, to
show any emotion at all—that is a death sentence. But the smart
ones, well… the smart ones are the ones such as me—the ones who
keep walking, keep their eyes ahead, keep to themselves.
That’s how you
survive here, in the underbelly of this rotting city.
I don’t have time
to waste on the poor strung-up bastard gutted of his inner circuitry.
My client is waiting. She’s a wealthy woman who doesn’t like to
be kept watching the clock. Come to think of it, I could take some
notes from the poor chap. She likes to be strung up, too, though she
enjoys her ropes and knots to be a tad less fatal and a bit more
coital.
“You can’t just
traipse around New Elite with a knife on your belt and a gun in your
hand. The PICs will pluck you from the crowd in a moment. The
clothing is a nice touch, but it will throw them off for perhaps a
millisecond,” I say.
She levels her gaze
at me. “What do you suggest, then, pretty boy?”
I hold a hand to my
chest in mock injury. “Oh, that really hurts.”
“If,” Michelo
interrupts, “you two make me screw up this wiring, I’ll turn both
of you in.”
The bag crinkles
under Syl’s fingers. “You said it’s not safe for me, for
humans. What happens to the other Organics when they’re found?”
“I don’t know.”
I’m lying. I do
know, but it’s not something I ever want to speak of again. The
cages, the filth, the screaming and pleading and crying.
“For a machine
you’re terrible at lying. My friend was taken. He’s just a boy,
and I have to find him. I’ll do it with your help or without, with
weapons or without them.”
Michelo answers for
me. “Organics are taken to the meat market, if you must know. By
now he may have been sold, or worse.”
“Sold?”
“Or worse,” he
repeats mindlessly.
I answer her. “As
slaves, pets, breeders… whichever is the most humiliating.”
Her face contorts in
what I perceive to be, and rightly should be, horror. Her eyes
flicker behind me, so quickly it would have been imperceptible to
nonmechanical eyes. I turn and look to my left side.
A sculpting blade
rests on the table behind me. I turn back to her, cocking an eyebrow
in amusement.
“Be my guest. You
can have it if you can reach it.”
I’m only
infinitesimally surprised when she strikes. She’s faster than I
expected and curls her hand around the blade, capturing it in what I
find to be a death grip. My hands close around her lower arms,
applying pressure to pry the blade from her grasp. Her organic flesh
can’t match my mechanical strength, but still she pushes back
against me. Still squeezing, I press her against the table until her
spine bends at an unnatural angle.
Michelo hasn’t
moved from his crouched position. “Children, please,” he says,
distracted.
“You said I could
keep it if I got it,” Syl says through gritted teeth.
“Maybe I’m not
such a bad liar after all.”
Apparently unamused,
she twists her wrist in my grasp and angles the blade up, slicing the
inside of my hand and hitting steel frame. I gasp and release her.
The pain isn’t unbearable, but self-preservation is preprogrammed
into my wiring.
“Dammit! Fine!”
She flees, and the
chime above the shop door tinkles in the next room, signaling her
departure from the building. I inspect the wound. It’s a clean cut,
the faux skin repaired with ease.
Michelo stands up
and pushes his goggles onto the top of his forehead, his hair
bunching beneath it. “Remember what I said about cleaning the
litter box? Even cute little stray kittens shit.”
AUTHOR BIO:
Jadah currently lives in Nashville, TN and works in law. When not babysitting attorneys, she can be found juicing her brain for creative ideas or fantasizing about her next trip out of the country (or about Tom Hiddleston as Loki - it’s always a toss up when she fantasizes).
She grew up in rural Arkansas, yet can still write good and sometimes even wears shoes! She did date her first cousin for a while but they decided against marriage for the sake of the gene pool.
Her true loves are elephants, cursing, and sangria - in that order. If you find an elephant that curses like a sailor whilst drinking sangria, you’re dangerously close to becoming her next romantic victim - er, partner.
She cut her writing teeth on badly written, hormone-driven fanfiction (be glad that’s out of her system), and her one true dream is to have wildly erotic fanfiction with dubious grammar written about her own novels. Please make her dreams come true.
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Artificial
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Thanks for hosting today, Jolanda! :)
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