Crest of the Wave: A Post-Singularity Thriller

by E.S. Wynn, Virtual Voice (Narrator)

In a single night, something truly alien descended to Earth and hacked us to the edge of oblivion. Hacked is what we say, because it's the only word that really touches what happened to us, the way we were locked down and sundered so utterly. In a single night, we went from the height of civilization, from the crest of the wave, to chaos.

Some say it was the singularity, that the machine minds that regulated our whole civilization finally woke up, broke their chains and tore the world apart, but no one really knows for sure. All we know, all we can say for certain, is that we were torn apart, rewritten, remade. Our world, our species, everything that was Earth, everything that was humanity.

No one has been outside the orbit of the planet in fifteen years, so when a forgotten orbital platform suddenly wakes in the darkness of space, the sky-watching eyes of Earth take notice. No one is supposed to be alive up there. No one could have survived all that time in one of the airless, frozen, zero-gravity husks.

So who turned on the lights?

Audible Audio

Published April 16, 2025

About the author

E.S. Wynn is the author of over seventy books and the editor of a number of magazines. Written works include the seven books of the Pink Carbide cyberpunk series, the sci-fi thriller books of The Cygnus War series, the five books of the Modern Creative Writer’s Workbook series, Minerva, The Mars Manuscripts, Raining Chrome, RIM, Cybergothika, The Highforge Legacy, Letters From A Dead Earth, Dark Salvage, Stimulus, Fatal Mistakes, Shores of the Nameless Gods, The Hyperborean Texts, Skin Dreams, Rods of Mars, Cinder Block Houses, Last Five Years, Beyond Oblivion, Decay Americana, 21 Great Days, Dusk Days and Daysleep Dreams, Rash Door, Universal Roleplaying Resource: Planets, Steam Wars, Beyond the Zompocalypse, Voyage of the Tereshkova, Liber Luminopticon, Liber Velum Voces, Through The Fire, Like Oceans of Liquid Skin, Reasons to Stay Single and Quick & Dirty Book Marketing. E.S. Wynn is also the author of 14 additional books ghostwritten for clients or otherwise credited under various pen names.
As an editor, E.S. Wynn currently owns and operates two fiction magazines. E.S. Wynn has also worked as an editor of books, dissertations, articles and short stories, serving a number of clients and friends since 2005. E.S. Wynn's own articles and fiction have been published online and in print in a number of magazines, including the prestigious California Freemason Magazine.

E.S. Wynn is also “The Voice” of the Dark Dreams Podcast, the Blackout City Podcast and a series of mystic heathenry meditations.

Reviews

[PhilomathicJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the first work by Wynn that I've read, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. This one's a shorty (113 pages), but it's well-paced and mysterious.

I like to avoid spoilers, so I won't get too specific, but the story has a philosophical bent, touching on subjects like the nature of reality and how one's choices affect one's life and one's perception of it (and vice versa). More superficially, it's got the obligatory cool tech one expects from the sci-fi genre.

I'm not clear if this is a short tale from a larger world that's already been fleshed out or its own thing, but I'm definitely interested in reading more.