QSFer Cody Sisco has a new queer cyberpunk book out (bi, gay, non-binary, poly, trans MTF, Resonant Earth book 3: Altered Bodies.
A breakthrough treatment promises salvation for Broken Mirrors—but the price could be Victor’s sanity, and the end of the American Union of Nations.
Altered Bodies plunges deeper into the fractured psyche of Victor Eastmore and the unraveling world of the American Union in this thrilling third installment of the Resonant Earth series.
Victor found a fragile kind of freedom. After escaping the Classification Commission in Semiautonomous California, he now works for his family’s healthcare company in the Louisiana Territories, striving to heal the mirror resonance syndrome patients he risked everything to save.
But his hard-won peace is as precarious as his mental state, and he’s moving closer to the edge of insanity.
When a mysterious figure known as the Diamond King offers a revolutionary new technology that could cure the patients and rescue the company from collapse, Victor is both intrigued and wary. Is this the breakthrough he’s been searching for—or a trap with devastating consequences?
This alternate history journey through a cautionary utopia tests the limits of trust, the costs of ambition, and the seductive pull of power. With cyberpunk intrigue, high-stakes alliances, and relentless tension, this volume propels the series into thrilling new territory.
Warning: Some violence.
Get It At Amazon | Publisher
Excerpt
THE COLD NILE Miracle was not simply the result of creative financing, poached labor, and astounding feats of engineering. The founders dared dream up a new civilization, write a new history in the sands of the desert, and emerge from the corruption and hopelessness of Manifest Destiny into a brighter future. It worked too well. See: Las Vegas and the End of Humanity.
—Robbie Eastmore, Another World (transmission date unknown)
12 December 1991
Las Vegas, Organized Western States
Below the glinting mirror-finish façades of Las Vegas towers, buried under markets shaded by photovoltaic fabric and cooled by fragrant and mood-enhancing mists, entombed within parched earth, a maze of machinery hummed quietly. In the subterranean darkness, though she felt cloistered, Ming Pearl knew she was never truly alone. Hearing only her own footfall and whispering breath and the gurgling of the lightstrips, any flat surface could become a holoscreen; any networked, free-ranging drone trundling down a hallway or buzzing close to the ceiling could be an instrument of surveillance. That was the price of working for the Diamond King.
Chilled air brushed against Pearl’s face as she entered the door to the vault—cold and feathery, like the freezer blasts that had cooled her parents’ restaurant kitchen. She paused and smiled to herself. Memories were time-traveling prayers, and there was nothing more important, more precious, than reverence. She remembered the smell of seasoned meat-filled pastries and dumplings and playing with the remains of cut vegetables—onions, zucchini, and eggplant were her favorites; they had such different personalities—while daring to hover her fingers close to the fiery pepper oil, not letting her hand fly away when the spitting oil burned her. She saw the hanging slabs of beef and poultry swinging from hooks like they were trying to fly free through the foggy air above Long Valley once again. A tingle traveled up her spine at the ghostly memory of shivering in the freezer until she couldn’t feel her fingers. She let these memories take hold and savored them. In a world that had become unrecognizable, she was determined to never let them go.
Lining two sides of the vault, embalmed bodies had been placed inside individual chambers, canted down toward their heads, where wires and tubes protruded and facilitated the circulation of data and fluids. She had lowered the temperature when she first arrived as a sign of respect. A tomb should be cold, inviting reverence, especially tombs for the missing and forgotten.
“All of you are treasures,” she said to the dead.
What melodrama. Here I am, performing my grief when no one is listening.
Her words echoed back from the white mycoceramic tile walls. She couldn’t hear the fans and pumps—despite their presence in the vault. As with so much of the Organized Western States, especially in Las Vegas, the imperceptible was what really mattered. Someone was always listening, harvesting secrets. She pushed away political concerns with a wave of the hand. This was a cold and quiet space for her misery, a place of emergence, where her rage might recede in time or grow to consume her.
I wish you were here, Brother. I wish I could see you again. But it is better that you are safe in faraway ground.
Quietly, shuffling in soft-bellied slippers, she walked to the small, stunted body of Rigoberto Watts: nineteen, born in Dos Rios, Semiautonomous California, diagnosed with mirror resonance syndrome at age nine. He’d deteriorated, deemed Class One by his thirteenth birthday, warehoused for years in a coma, and become physically atrophied, wasted. Never to be the man he could have been.
Yet, in death, he became someone’s treasure.
Rehabilitation had been an impossibility for Rigoberto as it had been for Pearl’s brother, who was part of the first wave of mirror resonance syndrome patients. The recommended dose of Personil had been higher back then, deadly in the long run. Reform came too late. Not even the great Jefferson Eastmore had been able to save her brother. Grief destroyed her family, one of the many tragic echoes that rippled out from the Carmichael Massacre and that beast Samuel Miller. Curse his name, foul his flesh, let his soul be tortured for eternity.
Her brother could have been one of the best pilots of his generation. A captain of the sky, surveying the vastness of the earth below.
It was cold comfort that she was not alone in her suffering.
Pearl placed a hand against Rigoberto’s face. His skin was hard, waxy, and as cool as the vault’s air. He left behind two fathers, a mother, two sisters, and a brother. Memories of his family traveled the supple neural fibers in his brain, memories that might now be finding a new home in diamond filaments in the darkness around her.
One day soon, implants would reignite living but broken minds, drawing their consciousnesses from the dark holes where they wallowed—but not soon enough for these cherished bodies. The Diamond King could not resurrect the dead.
She traced the outline of a skullplug, from where nanowire unspooled throughout Rigoberto’s right prefrontal lobe. A tiny blue light pulsed there once every sixty seconds, marking time, signaling to dumb meatbags like herself that this glorious technology was working, that it could be relied on, that they should trust it. Streams of data coursed through tendrils, firing electrical pulses throughout Rigoberto’s brain tissue. The data would—if she could keep the belief alive—help the Diamond King help humanity.
Time would tell whether she was betraying Jefferson Eastmore or loyally following his plans to their intended conclusion.
(chapter continues…)
Author Bio
Cody Sisco is an author, editor, publisher, and literary community organizer. His LGBT psychological science fiction series includes two novels thus far, Broken Mirror and Tortured Echoes. He is a freelance editor specializing in genre-bending fiction. In 2017, he co-founded Made in L.A. Writers, an indie author co-op dedicated to the support and appreciation of independent authors. His startup, BookSwell, is a literary events and media production company dedicated to lifting up marginalized voices and connecting readers and writers in Southern California and beyond. He serves as a co-chair of the Board of Directors for the Editorial Freelancers Association.
| Author Website | https://www.codysisco.com/ |
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