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CUBE: Anything Inside. Nothing Outside.
From the author of ALEX SIX.
*Released from the COMPLETED chapters from the Vella Series in 2021*
Booze doesn't freeze. That's the only good news of the month.
The snow started ten years ago and it never stopped. The Midwest is a white nothing now — roadhouses full of frozen regulars, cars full of mice, wind off the ridge that doesn't quit. Lolo Burkhart has survived it with a candle, a revolver with three rounds left. She counts her steps out loud.
Then a lonely man on a staircase asks her to play cards, and she runs.
She doesn't get far. A warm hand and a chemical rag bring her back. By dawn the sweep has come through the door — calm voices, black masks, a man blown apart in the parking lot — and Lolo is in the back of a wagon with a child asking what she did.
Welcome to the U.S. Midwest Outpost. A safe place for you and your family.
Inside the mountain, a hundred thousand people live on fifty hours of service a week and water at twenty credits a gallon. Every apartment comes with a glass box bolted to the front of it — ten by ten, seventy percent windows, no curtains allowed. And the law fits on a anything inside, nothing outside. Drugs, violence, sex, murder — all of it legal, as long as you stay behind the glass. Step out, and you go across the barrier to the Purple Zone. The mountain doesn't have prisons. It has a door.
Lolo gets a jumpsuit, a code, a blind man to look after, and a job.
The job is watching.
Sixty glass cubes on Grove Street. Six hours a shift. A partner who calls her Hawaii and says he watches everything. Three buttons that make sense — CLEAR, CONCERN, ESCALATE — and a fourth one, gold, with nothing written on it. Hit it when it's good, the instructor says. You'll know.
She learns what the gold button does on the night she finds out what her own cube is worth.
And then the man from the bar turns up on Grove Street. In her section. In a box with his mother and a pegboard, playing both hands because nobody will sit across from him. He put a round back in her gun so she'd have a fair shake. He watched his mother plant the pills that got her arrested and said nothing. And on a shortage Thursday, with the water at eighty credits a gallon and the whole mountain thirsty and mean, Lolo comes around the grid at two-fifteen and he isn't at the table anymore.
He's standing over the cot.
What happens next is inside the glass. Legal. Clear. Until it isn't — until a dying woman gets up, gets the door open, and takes one step onto the tile with a camera in the ceiling and a watcher in a closet who knows the man's name.
Tag it, her partner says. It was never going to be a choice.
CUBE is a thriller about surveillance with the cameras pointed the wrong way. About a city that solved crime by selling it. About a woman who got good at being alone and called it a skill — until a man with a cribbage board, a blind engineer with a joke he tells to lamps, and a stadium full of strangers force her to choose what she's willing to be seen doing, and who she's willing to tag to keep her seat.
Because the rule has a cost, and somebody has to enforce it. Somebody has to sit in a closet with her thumb over a button and decide whether a man in the doorway of his own glass box has both feet inside.
Somebody has to read the form for the lies.
Gritty, funny in the places that hurt, and brutal where it counts. Forty episodes. Three parts. A last line you'll argue about. A blizzard that stops.
For readers who came up on Stephen King's cold Maine and stayed for Black Mirror's colder screens — a frozen-Midwest dystopia with a mouth on it, a woman you'll follow into the dark because she swears at it, and a mountain full of people who forgot how to look at anything but the box.
Anything inside. Nothing outside.
Mature
*Released from the COMPLETED chapters from the Vella Series in 2021*
Booze doesn't freeze. That's the only good news of the month.
The snow started ten years ago and it never stopped. The Midwest is a white nothing now — roadhouses full of frozen regulars, cars full of mice, wind off the ridge that doesn't quit. Lolo Burkhart has survived it with a candle, a revolver with three rounds left. She counts her steps out loud.
Then a lonely man on a staircase asks her to play cards, and she runs.
She doesn't get far. A warm hand and a chemical rag bring her back. By dawn the sweep has come through the door — calm voices, black masks, a man blown apart in the parking lot — and Lolo is in the back of a wagon with a child asking what she did.
Welcome to the U.S. Midwest Outpost. A safe place for you and your family.
Inside the mountain, a hundred thousand people live on fifty hours of service a week and water at twenty credits a gallon. Every apartment comes with a glass box bolted to the front of it — ten by ten, seventy percent windows, no curtains allowed. And the law fits on a anything inside, nothing outside. Drugs, violence, sex, murder — all of it legal, as long as you stay behind the glass. Step out, and you go across the barrier to the Purple Zone. The mountain doesn't have prisons. It has a door.
Lolo gets a jumpsuit, a code, a blind man to look after, and a job.
The job is watching.
Sixty glass cubes on Grove Street. Six hours a shift. A partner who calls her Hawaii and says he watches everything. Three buttons that make sense — CLEAR, CONCERN, ESCALATE — and a fourth one, gold, with nothing written on it. Hit it when it's good, the instructor says. You'll know.
She learns what the gold button does on the night she finds out what her own cube is worth.
And then the man from the bar turns up on Grove Street. In her section. In a box with his mother and a pegboard, playing both hands because nobody will sit across from him. He put a round back in her gun so she'd have a fair shake. He watched his mother plant the pills that got her arrested and said nothing. And on a shortage Thursday, with the water at eighty credits a gallon and the whole mountain thirsty and mean, Lolo comes around the grid at two-fifteen and he isn't at the table anymore.
He's standing over the cot.
What happens next is inside the glass. Legal. Clear. Until it isn't — until a dying woman gets up, gets the door open, and takes one step onto the tile with a camera in the ceiling and a watcher in a closet who knows the man's name.
Tag it, her partner says. It was never going to be a choice.
CUBE is a thriller about surveillance with the cameras pointed the wrong way. About a city that solved crime by selling it. About a woman who got good at being alone and called it a skill — until a man with a cribbage board, a blind engineer with a joke he tells to lamps, and a stadium full of strangers force her to choose what she's willing to be seen doing, and who she's willing to tag to keep her seat.
Because the rule has a cost, and somebody has to enforce it. Somebody has to sit in a closet with her thumb over a button and decide whether a man in the doorway of his own glass box has both feet inside.
Somebody has to read the form for the lies.
Gritty, funny in the places that hurt, and brutal where it counts. Forty episodes. Three parts. A last line you'll argue about. A blizzard that stops.
For readers who came up on Stephen King's cold Maine and stayed for Black Mirror's colder screens — a frozen-Midwest dystopia with a mouth on it, a woman you'll follow into the dark because she swears at it, and a mountain full of people who forgot how to look at anything but the box.
Anything inside. Nothing outside.
Mature
Audible Audio
Published September 8, 2026
About the author
Vince Taplin
29 books332 followersVince Taplin is an award-winning author and storyteller who has mastered the art of mashing subtle noir with modern thrillers. His characters are witty, promising, and believable, but never predictable. Vince is a serial entrepreneur with a contagious passion for life.
Alex Six is Taplin’s third foray into fiction. His previous fiction works include The RC Act and The Mourning Bell.
Follow Vince on Instagram @ VinceTaplin
Alex Six is Taplin’s third foray into fiction. His previous fiction works include The RC Act and The Mourning Bell.
Follow Vince on Instagram @ VinceTaplin
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