Quantum Lives: Tales of Undercity

Set in the Consilience an InfoSpheric Assemblage of data and natural worlds enclosed in the Global System somewhere in the early 22nd Century. The opening tale is within the enclaves of Undercity where we discover Precarity Jones and her sidekicks, a group of latter day corporate hackers and fixers after the Global Meltdown and the period of the Great Transition, where the virtual and the actual no longer have boundaries between them and a post-Singularity Civilization arises amid the ruins of a failing and dying world of capitalism. This is the beginning of the Quantum Lives Trilogy that will delve into the sociology, politics, science, and transformational processes of our near future singularity.

The notion of an Intelligent City - a Sentient City of living algorithms organizing and shaping both the infrastructure and its inhabitants in an Infospheric world of play and work, creativity and innovation. What would happen in such a sentient city? What if the city herself was a character in a novel... one that could take on the form of human and inhuman structurations and subjectivations at will, a selective and impersonal system of smart technologies that adapt and learn in inhuman cycles we can only begin to register on our less than adequate physical architecture?

I've fused comic book noir for entertainment, but am seeking through it to instill an affirmative message that will become apparent as the story proceeds. The dystopic aspect is about the "futureless future" of neoliberalism. The counter-world to this is not to play good guys / bad guys, virus/anti-virus against each other: a Manichean vision and dualist gnostic... But rather to expose the hole in the rhizome, the fabric of this closed loop of a false history and discover another path forward into an open universe of possibility.

- Steven Craig Hickman ©2015 Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog's author is strictly prohi