gaffo wrote: ↑Sun Apr 21, 2019 1:15 amBTW, not that it is my business, but you got me curious, what is the theme of your recent work?
Geez Sir Gaffo - you gaff on a lot! I can't address all u write.
To be honest again, i'm not into the older era of fiction - a friend of mine loves Phillip K Dick - ..and he smokes trees of weed.
I listened to a Phil K D podcast on that site you listed on my way home today, it took about 20 mins before I realised how bored I was...it aint my thang.
The 'theme' of my writing or art?
My writing - Chapter One of my novel Alpha Two on my site here:-
http://www.androcies.com/alphatwo.html
..has a blurb at the start (as in the back cover of a book), that details the general theme.
But hey, if you wanna have a read of chapter 22 which I wrote after smoking a spliff - here it is (of course it needed serious editing the next day)
Marlow is the business partner of the protagonist Helix Carone, and here he is going into a 'virtual' game where he has a neural-net cap on his head - ALL his senses are replaced by the technology within the neural net. (Marlow is a bit of an adrenalin junkie - he grew up in a rough area to say the least) - Helix on the other hand is a hacker and part creator of the original neural-net system - he's on the run from the company that created the neural-net.
I plan to put some more sample chapters up on my site - but hey - it's only $3.99 US and the free kindle app runs on all platforms. Amazon's review system at the mo is very restrictive but if you get a copy - and you have spent at least $50 on Amazon in the past 12mths - you get to review a book! Ridiculous I know - more money money money. ...and the reviews that have been made are on the UK site and AU site - they don't replicate to ALL domains - crazy.
First 3 chapters are on Amazon:-
https://www.amazon.com/Alpha-Two-Andrew ... B0054E2WOE
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ALPHA TWO - BY ANDREW SEAS
CHAPTER 22
THE ALPHA-BET
Marlow was only three minutes into the neural-net game named The Alpha-Bet, the underworld of the Amsterdam cyber streets. Two hours and a bar stood in front of him from which to make as much money as possible. Nobody's walking into virtual clubs and taking stuff, liquids, anything you want for your own personal experiment. Inviting glassware, soothing colors and the taste etched to perfection.
Marlow gazed at the strange concoction now positioned on the bar.
The barman grinned in anticipation. “You wanna fry a little, friend?” The man laughed and added, “You won’t rip from this trip!”
The drink glowed blue, swirled and sparked as if embodied with electrical static charges.
“You done it?” asked Marlow.
“Three times. Freaks the shit out of me. You know when you know,” said the barman rubbing his nose and adding, “I’m Lazareth, twenty-eighth on the leaderboard. You won’t get near that score with these other drinks. Only a FOX can get to that level.” Lazareth then held a fist up to Marlow and said, “Chin chin.”
Marlow raised his right hand, clenched his fingers and tapped Lazareth's fist. He then slowly lowered his hand and took hold of the shot glass.
“You gonna go sick! Sick!” yelled the barman unable to contain his excitement. “Pupils, that’s all we are!” he said pointing two fingers at his eyes, “Pupils of the light.”
Marlow threw the Fact-Or-X shot into his mouth, tilted his head back and swallowed. The cold came screaming through every nerve sending a burnt message. Chill factor X. His mind warped to super analysis then an epiphany. Words rang true and now he understood them. X was superfluous, beyond understanding. The chill was real and beyond death to the point of X. Like a drug, any drug—all drugs, receptors fine tuned to its perfect caress. A fatal belief in the masses, that their brain could ever fully recover, that they would one day continue, normal without its injection, satisfying aeons of evilution, the Yin. He needed Yang, more drugs or a fucking good psychstim. He'd do a job, any job—plug someone for a hit and there was plenty of work.
Space and time condensed into matter. Light such to be nothing and more powerful than anything. A fix of some kind, any kind—but seemingly impossible. He stumbled into a street that was dark, shiny and damp.
A cockney accent called out, “Fox! I got the antidote—the fix you crave—but you gotta do a job. Don't fuck it up, or you'll be craving for two hours instead of two minutes.” The man offered Marlow a gun. “Head up the street into a club called the Let’s Go, tell Tony on the door Darian sencha.”
Marlow took the weapon and did as instructed, arriving at the entrance cyber sweat dripping from his chin.
“You Tony?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Darian sent me.”
“Is that right—a FOX?” The Dutchman laughed then bent down to Marlow’s ear and whispered, “OK you got two minutes. Inside there's a bad ass, a big black mother fucker pimp called Willis, another FOX wearing a red tracksuit and surrounded by whores and muscle. You won't be able to get near him for a clean shot, you won't be able to look at him without being belted, let alone raise your piece. You clip him, you jump behind the bar and a safe will open, inside cash—forty thousand and an antidote. You got the balls?”
“Out the way…” Marlow placed his right hand on the gun and pushed through a poorly lit crowd.
It wasn't long until he found what he was looking for, another player.
“Hi Nouno Urho, I'm Liz.”
“What? You one of Willis's whores?” quizzed Marlow.
“Willis who?”
With that Marlow grabbed her by the arm and dragged her through the crowd towards a corner where he could see the likely muscle. An obelisk sized character turned around to face Marlow. Marlow caught sight of the flecks of a red tracksuit.
“I need to speak to Willis, this bitch just tried to pull one over on him.”
The muscle frowned in confusion and made a fatal mistake in stepping back and turning around to Willis. Marlow lifted the gun and shot at the tracksuit square in the chest, he then stepped backwards with the girl in front using her as cover. Bullets tore into her as Marlow dove over the bar. The safe was there, the cash and the antidote, and beside the antidote another concoction labeled, God Mode. The bar was still being shredded by bullets so Marlow drank the God Mode and gave it a test, standing up into a hail of bullets and returned fire until his piece was all that made noise. Of course it was a test, he could have just gone straight for the antidote, but that would have been game, set and match. Game over for some.
Helix, meanwhile, observed Marlow in the flesh, flinching on the sofa as if in the middle of a crazed nightmare. He watched the scene unfold on the screen, watching Marlow take himself to extremes that most men hadn't the bottle. It was only while viewing Marlow in cyberspace that Helix could ever come close to understanding what dwelt within. Years of a Fire Zone upbringing embodying a hardcore reality, for Marlow the virtual was an escape for what still burned inside.
Not wanting to endure any more, Helix took a magazine and walked around to the side of the sofa pressing a button beside a glass door which opened onto a small terrace containing an even smaller pool. A beige wall two metres high surrounded the terrace and judging by overhanging branches, Helix calculated the terrace to be two to three stories high.
He walked barefoot around the pool and across tiles warmed by sunshine that only partially broke through the shade of the tree. He carefully sat down on a white plastic deckchair, padded with green cushions.
Where in the hell am I? Helix thought. He found the notion of not having any idea where he was disturbing. If it weren't for the skin grafts, he would move the chair to the side of the wall and clamber up for a peek, see if anything looked familiar. He knew he was north, far north of LA. He returned his attention to the magazine—an article on Lunar One.
Thoughts of contacting Alpha Two had entered his mind on more than one occasion during the day but had been put off by the need to sleep. He glanced at his watch. It was three o'clock. He then returned his attention to the Bioscope article. Photos of both the Alpha and Delta model androids accompanied the article and explained how Bioscope had intentionally made them physically identical to humans to help people working alongside them feel more comfortable. Helix laughed at the irony.
It was the AI construct programming that made them truly resemble humans. The spherical three-sixty degrees of scope endlessly ticking over its past and plotting its future, manifesting its personality. Degrees to simulate happiness, sadness, anger and all the other human traits, and the effect of that upon the AI’s logic. A degree of belief, randomness and chaos coerced into logic, fuzzy logic. Learning from the consequences of mistakes, better judgement and its benefits, all mapped for self analysis and self adjustment—some called it construct growth, others construct maturity, the essence of an Artificial Intelligence.
Helix had never seen a completed android, in the electroclasp, the flesh, the finished product. Spectra was his domain. While the droid constructs were rigorously being developed, he was coding the software to monitor and regulate them, not that any programmers had access to the finished product—that was the province of the android engineers. He took a moment, sat back into the chair and considered how this piece of machinery would be coping in the real world. Langford must have put a lot of effort into its construct to make it fit into the human world, otherwise it would never have lasted this long unnoticed. Helix pondered over what the droid—Alpha Two—would be doing right now. What does an android on the run do? No doubt it would have a room somewhere, probably with a backup battery pack on charge most of the time. It would also be likely to be carrying a couple while on the move. But move—where? Probably, he thought Alpha Two would spend most of its time jacked into the neural-net, waiting…in anticipation to project the next move to Helix.
A gentle, warm breeze occasionally made the leaves rustle above, the odd one spiraling into the pool. Helix could find nothing further of interest in the magazine, so he placed it upon his chest, closed his eyes and began to doze
...........). if that torrent is dead after all these years, you will find a lower qualtiy mp3 set over at Internet Archive (why IA did not find my higher quality mp3 set years ago and then offered them - is curious. I guess that knowbody in possesion of the higher quality knew about IA in order to offer it).
