Code World: Signs of the Apocalypse

by Barry Pomeroy

Young people want to hack, old people want to use the system to their advantage, and groups set up events where code reality is mixed with what they call real. Anything is possible if you have a high data line and money and the willingness to take risks.
Genetic code is modifiable through cheap and dubious online kits, and VR technology allows anyone to visit even the most dangerous slums. Lying in bed in secure buildings, and using hologram projectors that allow them to be both present and invulnerable, people stalk the dismal streets looking for ever more exciting carnage, a child splayed under the wheels of a truck, the bodies of Ebola victims and the carnage of the resource wars.
Hackers gather where the avatars are thickest, however, cracking firewalls and into the code stream. They wreak havoc with the imagery, but also hack along the line, getting to the source, which is the reclining meat body. With both biology and tech in flux, ordinary people have to be inventive if they’re going to survive in the maelstrom of modern life.

222 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 10, 2015

About the author

Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.