Novel Published - Digital

The novel I completed in 2013 is now available through Amazon's Kindle Store at this link. You can read an extract below:


The informational streams linked to me by Wheeler open with a residential tower block undergoing a controlled demolition procedure. At his behest I scan through a montage of buildings collapsing into dust clouds. Multi-storeys disintegrate and fold in on themselves as though made of paper; bridge spans are released from sturdy rigidity into freefall guillotining the river below; oil rigs lurch like dying animals; vast stadia ripple into ruins like a structural tsunami; brutalist concrete monoliths implode as though the ground were sucking them in and exhaling a lungful of acrid smog.

Columns, beams, lattices of girders vacillate in their constructed forms, trying to adhere to their strict tensile limits before being vetoed by the higher hierarchical laws of physics. They pirouette in place, parts of an intricately choreographed architectural ballet, their steel frameworks buckling and contorting under stresses far in excess of their design parameters.

I ask him what the purpose of this thread of images is for, but get nothing but a continued binge of destruction. Chimney stacks topple like proud forest oaks, hotel complexes melt as though made of candle wax. The towers of the World Trade Center are swallowed up, each floor folding neatly away on top of the one below, ready to be packed away into storage until deemed sound enough structurally to be reinstated.

From there he forwards me to images of the legendary Las Vegas ruins. Like the international airports, Las Vegas lies as a symbol of former avarice and wealth marooned in the boondocks of the Nevada desert. The only visitors here are curious travellers who wish to document or witness the desolation and aura of time-worn dreams. The gargantuan hotel complexes and bombastic casinos lie in ruin like the fortresses of a fallen empire; the strip lies cracked and spalled; the hyper-real stimulation of the neon plumages extinguished and extinct. Everywhere the desert sands have encroached like the watermark of a steadily rising tide.

Wheeler points out to me that Las Vegas was, in retrospect, the geographical prototype for the online environment; a place in which any desire could be sated, any vice quenched, every sensation a distraction, a hinterland of abandonment and numbing simulation. The nucleus of a reality distorted by a myriad cynosures struggling for dominance and attention.

Wheeler says that if the ruins of ancient Egypt, Rome, Greece, and the structures of Ankor Wat and Machu Picchu, encapsulate the illuminating touchstones of civilisation’s progression, so too the desolate ruins of Las Vegas represent the physical foundations for a new digitised landscape to emerge where the only limits are those imposed by each individual imagination.

Again, Wheeler probes the issue of my submitting to his new therapy-in progress. Like before I slide out of any commitment, our physical distance acting as the lubrication of my evasiveness. Instead I link him to a video stream of two people undergoing oral sex, their faces transplanted by those of Martin Luther King and Eva Peron, with the hope of fractionally distracting him.

Though for all my bluffing, I am well aware that soon I shall be ensnared in Wheeler’s psychoanalytic bear-trap; its grip tightening in increments with my struggling. I feel no sense of trepidation at the prospect of becoming some kind of experimental guinea pig at the behest of an eccentric fallen-from-grace technologist; merely that I fail to understand how it has fallen to me to fulfil such a dubious role. Have I, unbeknownst to me, been vetted, monitored and selected especially from a pool of many, or have I been hijacked at random by Wheeler under a misapprehension on his part of my prior involvement? Perhaps his faculties regarding this realm in which he is operating have become skewed, or critically eroded as popular opinion would gleefully attest.

In any case, I can feel that the time is drawing near where I will need to confront and oblige my interrogator, whose persistence I can’t help but think must belie some reasoned, if flawed, motive. I can sense his hold over my consciousness gaining ground, as though he were engaged in tactical trench warfare, shrinking the uninhabitable no-man’s-land between us. He is devouring my live stream and archives like an online parasite feeding on his host with my data as his elixir vitae.

Soon, for the sake of my own mental wellbeing, I will need to submit myself to his Structural Theory.