KINETICS
Nathaniel Koszer
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GENRE: SciFi
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BLURB:
After
stoking rebellions across the globe, six super-powered LO-ECs dealt a massive
blow to the military by disabling their worldwide communication tower. But in
doing so, they suffered grave injuries, and Spidre, the world leader, will not
let them rest. As he desperately clings to power, there is only one course of
action for the LO-ECs: hide and heal, then finally bring the fight to Spidre’s
front door.
Breaching
Spidre’s force field will require splitting up and launching simultaneous
surprise attacks all over the world. And in some of these places, the military
is the least of the LO-ECs’ concerns. They’ll also face legions of robots
controlled by an eccentric oligarch, guerilla outfits led by their own
super-powered LO-ECs, and the ever-present threat of being discovered and
bombed into dust by a world leader with nothing left to lose.
If
their power is enough to survive all of this, the reward for the LO-ECs is a
confrontation with Spidre at his compound, complete with all of the secrets and
plans he has amassed for the last twenty years.
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EXCERPT
“We’ve got to leave now!” Naren yelled to Edgar and Symon as he landed and set Sera down. She was shaky, but able to stand on her own. Symon and Edgar were walking onto the field from a tunnel in the southeast corner of the stadium. Both of them had their hands wrapped around the grips of their elcycles, powerful electric motorcycles powered by their LO-EC energy. Walking with them was Eric, the person who had taken up the role of leading the rebellion in Pittsburgh.
“You’re leaving!? After what just happened!?” Eric screamed.
“That happened because we’re here!” Symon snapped back. “We
need to get out of this city, and do it loudly enough that everyone knows we’re
gone.”
“Sera told me the plan before she took off. Together we
programmed the coordinates for her garden in New Orleans,” Edgar said.
“We aren’t going to New Orleans,” Naren replied. Sera’s head
snapped up to look at him, then as she realized the issue, her head sank.
“Isn’t it the closest place that we have a safe hideout?”
Edgar asked. “They just tried to bomb us here. If we get spotted entering New
Orleans, the same thing will happen. It’d be the same no matter where we go. If
there are peacekeepers there, then it isn’t safe now.”
“So where do we go?” Sera asked, her eyes filled with tears.
“Why are you all standing around?! We have to get to Symon’s
hideout!” Nadine screamed as she and Victor set their feet on the ground. She
was happy and relieved to know she could now carry him with little effort. The
last time she had tried, it was almost a disaster.
The plan clicked into place in everyone’s head. They had
spent weeks at Symon’s hideout, an old house in an abandoned city called San
Diego. It was now their best chance at hiding out without risking the lives of
others.
“Eric, we’re going to blast right through the peacekeeper’s
front line, make sure they know we’ve left the city. Go up into the lookout and
signal to us if you see any targets we can hit,” Naren directed.
“Victor, you’ll be at the front. When we get the signal from
Eric up high, you mow the road,” Naren said. Victor nodded.
“Edgar, you’ll be on an elcycle in the middle, with Sera
riding in front of you,” Naren continued. “If anyone gets close, you know what
to do. Symon, you’ll be in the back providing suppressive fire to our rear as
we escape. Nadine and I will be up high and go wherever we’re needed.”
When Naren concluded his directions, everyone moved with
haste. Edgar and Symon re-programmed the elcycles to go to San Diego and put
them into position at the north of the field. Symon reached into one of the
cargo bags on the elcycle and pulled out the retrofitted peacekeeper armor part
that he’d had since the first major
battle in Chicago. He slid his arm into the piece of armor and when it
connected with the microtransformer in his hand, the mounted machine gun
whirred to life, ready to fire once again. Naren helped Sera onto the other
elcycle. Edgar hopped on behind her, and they were ready to go.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Guest Post:
“The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120 Volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat."
That is a line from the 1999 sci-fi smash hit The Matrix. For most people who have seen the film, it was a forgettable sentence from an exposition dump sandwiched between epic fight scenes. For me it was the single most influential movie quote I have ever heard. That one line was the spark that turned into the inferno that is my own sci-fi duology: The Energy Crisis series.
The line is delivered by a character named Morpheus as he fills in the protagonist, Neo, on all the dystopian future human history he has missed. Morpheus is explaining that due to the aforementioned human power output, AI driven machines have enslaved mankind to use it as an energy source. To this day I have no idea if what Morpheus said is actually accurate. But his quote led me to the following questions:
What if humans could harness that power for themselves?
What would happen if something went awry with such technology?
The latter question was what created the plot of Latency and Kinetics, the two books in the Energy Crisis series. The individuals superpowered by this biotechnological malfunction are considered too dangerous to live by the world government and hunted mercilessly. However, it was the first question that led to the creation of the entire world inside the series.
I first reasoned that for such a technology to exist, some sort of biotech body modification would be involved that turns body heat into usable electricity. This in turn meant that not everyone would be on board with the idea, so regular means of producing electricity would probably still exist in some form. I thought long and hard about how long it would take for such technology to A) Exist, and B) Progress far enough that something going awry is unexpected and not immediately controlable. That landed me on 26th century earth.
Now that I had my timeframe, I had to imagine what 26th century earth would look like. This was the portion of my world building that took the most amount of time to research, but in general it seemed that the world by that point would be overpopulated, and resource starved. The government would have tried to find ways to feed and house the most people with the least amount of resources, which meant housing as many people as possible close together. The government would have to offer a free or very low cost living space to a lot of people in one area, and thus the idea of the megaskyscraper complexes was born – a million or more people all living together in buildings hundreds of stories high and placed close together. There would also need to be an efficient way to feed so many people, so I decided that each major city would also have several giant food dispensaries, where crops are genetically modified to grow quickly and hydroponically. Finally, with so many people living in these megaskyscrapers and getting free food and housing, I reasoned that most of the rest of a city would be left abandoned. Thus the world of Energy Crisis was complete: A planet filled with abandoned cities dotted with massive buildings housing millions of people, and powered by either conventional electricity or their own body heat.
There are of course, other parts of the world that are explored in the book but can’t be in this short form essay, such as how the world seeks out entertainment or how the lives of the ultrawealthy differ from regular people. I hope that folks pick up copies of Latency and Kinetics to find out about these facets and more.
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AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Nate
grew up in Brooklyn NY, but now calls the Bronx home along with his wife and
their sons. Nate grew up on all things sci-fi. Partly due to his chronic
illness, Nate always had a special place in his heart for the X-Men, and
especially the invulnerable Wolverine. This was heavy inspiration for his first
novel, Latency a superhero sci-fi story which released March 5, 2024. His
second novel, Kinetics, will release on March 4, 2025.
Website:
https://natekoszer.com/
BlueSky:
https://bsky.app/profile/natejklol.bsky.social
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/natejklol
https://www.amazon.com/Kinetics-Nathaniel-Koszer-ebook/dp/B0DP3JWQZF/ref=sr_1_1
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GIVEAWAY
Nathaniel Koszer will be awarding a $10 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner.
Thank you for featuring KINETICS today.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing. Sounds really good.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like a great read.
ReplyDelete