Dying Paradigm

by David Rogers

Streets or suites, it’s all the same. Everyone has problems. They’re all too busy with theirs to care about yours. Aramenta Nimi is one more forgotten face, lost in a sea of thirty-five million souls struggling to sink or swim in the Rotten Apple. Digital is sexy, and cybernetics can rebuild you better than before, but mostly everyone’s just looking to get by and get ahead. Whatever it takes, whoever has to die, that’s how it is. As much as it all costs, life is still cheap. When corps can turn money into nation-state power, they don’t have to sulk when their market share isn’t what they want it to be. Money buys bodies, weapons, armor, tanks, and everything else needed to boost stock prices, profits, and juicy quarterly bonuses. It also stops any yelling that might come from what’s left of the government. Tired of competing for shelf space and patent rights? Redefine what speed of business means. To something that includes firepower. After a greedy megacorp looking to lock down their market space hands the wrong delivery job to Aramenta, her whole life gets turned upside down and shot apart in a nanosecond. There’s a bounty on her head that’ll boost any squatter gutter punk into a 5th Avenue penthouse. She was just one dirty face in the endless crowds, now she’s a paycheck with a name. One that’s being blasted across the net a hundred times a second. Because she’s bad for business. A blip on the balance sheet. If running from everything you ever wanted, all you ever had, keeps you breathing … do you run or fight? Sometimes dreams die.

332 pages, Paperback

Published January 27, 2017