Ketcel

by Chad Deal

What does a highly subjective virtual reality say about reality itself? What does identity mean when our lives are split between our real selves and our virtual selves? Which is more real, the body or the avatar?

Ketcel is an absurdist, hopeful-dystopian, psychedelic post-cyberpunk adventure, inspired by the half-truths of history, current events, and all-too-possible futures.

Every year, thousands of Americans are smuggled through narcotunnels beneath the monolithic US/Mexico border wall to find affordable healthcare in Tijuana. Don Collins, a retired timeshare salesman from Florida, finds himself running for his life after becoming an involuntary contestant on a ludicrous cartel game show. Luna Teschner, a rookie livecast journalist living in Mexico City, is contacted by an anonymous source offering access to Tijuana's secret corporate gulags. Tijuana's Haitian police captain, Kervens Dessalines, has a taste for designer telepathics and garter belts, but he's willing to give up everything he's worked for to find the woman whose body he keeps appearing in while stoned.

Don and Luna embark on a perilous journey through the desert wilds of borderland Baja, pursued by circuit-bent Border Patrol automatons, a geriatric cartel with a twisted sense of humor, and the constant need to captivate viewers. Along the way, they encounter unforgiving landscapes, rideshare pirates, deported aliens, noise punks, monster taco trucks, and the occasional hallucination to test the limits of their dumb luck and sanity.

This story is in the tradition of authors such as William Gibson, Octavia Butler, Neal Stephenson, Ursula K Le Guin, Philip K. Dick, and Greg Egan, exploring an absurdist near-future to talk about current events, politics, border dynamics, and a little bit of philosophy. Think Black Mirror with a sense of humor, on a sturdy dose of psychedelics.

Visit ketcel.com to purchase paperback, ebook, and original soundtrack cassette tape.

364 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 1, 2021

About the author

Chad Deal is an author and musician from San Diego, CA. His debut psychedelic post-cyberpunk novel, Ketcel, was released by Stay Strange Publishing in 2021. He currently plays bass with brutal prog trio INUS and aggressive math lounge quintet Phantom Twins. His solo material is released under the alias e.g. phosphate.

Reviews

[Patrick Loveland · Rating 5 out of 5]

[ : : review • pending : : ]

[Mat Rakers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ketcel is one of those books that could be a forerunner in the next evolution of the cyberpunk genre.

Highly entertaining, author Chad Deal explores a dystopian future in Tijuana in which the border town is filled with United States health care refugees. Themes of loss and spirituality juxtapose a technologically savvy narrative. The characters are human to the core, playing out their lives against eerily familiar landscapes that stand as warnings about our current time period and policies.

I can’t wait to read the next one.

[Leland Lydecker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some stories are just that: stories. Simple. One dimensional. Easily digestible entertainment.

Some stories are much, much more than that. Some are complex conductive elements comprised of dozens of vibrant, glowing fibers, woven together specifically to guide us into the psychedelic cyberpunk future that might be.

Chad Deal’s Ketcel is the latter.

In a future where US citizenship is a subscription service and those with lapsed documentation are promptly deported over the border into “Limbo,” a hellish labor camp where criminals and former citizens can work off their debt in the manufacturing plants and warehouses of the Baja Autonomous Zone, a series of seemingly unrelated glitches brings together a colorful cast of characters.

Jaded retiree Don Collins paid a mule to smuggle him to Tijuana for a cheap medical operation. After a series of inexplicable miscommunications brand him as a “runner” attempting to flee from his medical debt, Don finds himself marked for death on the open world life-or-death gorecast Toreros y Alarmas!

Sarcastic livecast journalist Luna Teschner is welcomed to her new job, and swiftly given the green light to pursue the assignment “she” pitched– only the assignment to livecast the brutal conditions inside Limbo’s Maquilandia work camps isn’t one she’s ever heard of.

Kervens Dessalines, Tijuana's Haitian police captain, has a softer side and a taste for designer hallucinogens. When the comfortable confines of Kervens’ virtual life begin to unravel, he discovers himself unexpectedly hitchhiking in the body of a woman who may or may not be real.

And something– some unknown entity or higher power or glitch in the machine of virtual reality– seems to have not only drawn these characters together, but to be continuing to shape their journey.

The reader wouldn’t be blamed for assuming that their goal is escape. Don wants to escape death at the hands of Los Compas de Baja Autonoma. He’s also trying to drown a lingering case of guilt for the daughter he lost, and the life he wasted as a timeshare salesman. Ironically, Americans like Don are probably as responsible for the hellish privatization of the US government as the corporations who have taken her over.

Luna is a woman on a mission. Not only is she out to bring the truth to the world by livecasting breaking news through her groundbreaking ocular implant, she also has a more pressing need to create viral content. The financial success that comes with it can save her mother’s life by paying off her absent father’s massive gambling debts.

Kervens has always dreamed of escape. From his life. From his body. And from Haiti and then Baja Autonoma, all the way across the heavily guarded border into San Diego.

Beneath the story of each character seeking their individual escape or salvation, less-tangible themes begin to emerge. Ketcel is both a journey, and the building– and solving– of a mystery. It involves mythological elements as ancient as the Mayans interwoven with a vision of the brutally hopeless and broken future which we seem to be fast approaching.

Ketcel is an epic adventure full of characters so lifelike and richly animated that it’s impossible not to relate to them. It’s authentic to a future that hasn’t arrived yet, but is lurking just around the corner.