CyberLife: Book 1 of the CyberLife Series

By Chip Buxton

The year is 2109, and Jim Murphy, a 39-year-old Knowledge Systems Architect Consultant, is bored. Week after week is spent solving other people's ridiculous knowledge-tech problems. He's been working for SciPop, a Knowledge Applications Company, for 13 years, along with his Vertal, Jasper. A Vertal is a customized, interactive, artificially intelligent hologram, and every Physical's primary link to the CyberSphere. Jim is a Physical. And like every Physical, Jim was assigned Jasper on his 18th birthday by the VertaLife Corporation. VertaLife makes the Vertals, SciPop develops the applications they use, and Jim fixes the problems clients create when using the applications. Just as Jim lives, works, and socializes in the physical world, Vertals live, work, and intermingle in the CyberSphere, coexisting and coordinating with other Vertals, appliances and whatever else gets attached to the CyberSphere. A Physicals access to a Vertal is through a Cy-Com, normally surgically implanted, and almost every Physical in the world has one. Except for Jim, who hates the idea of being plugged into the CyberSphere full time and chooses to use Techspecs instead: an older technology that Jim prefers because they are portable, disposable, and quite often, losable. Jim has about 100 pairs scattered around his apartment, office and favorite pub, but rarely in his pocket. For beer-drinking, burger-eating, wise-cracking Jim, every week is spent solving problems which never stay solved. But not this week. Jim is assigned to help one SciPop's Corporate Board Member's accomplish a hostile acquisition of a small hiking store owned by avowed tech-hater Laura Meyers. Somehow, Laura has survived just fine without using a Vertal, and that is a big problem which makes SciPop nervous. Jim is tasked to fix this problem and convince Laura to sell her store to SciPop so they can shut it down. But, midway through the project, Jim's Vertal disappears. And his overly concerned sentient appliances are of no help, although they would tell you otherwise. But as Jim searches for Jasper, he discovers something evolving that may be more important than a missing Vertal or acquiring an uncooperative store. SciPop has a hidden agenda, and for Jim, it will challenge everything he thought he knew, changing both him and Laura for the rest of their lives.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B08ZD6TGCP
• ISBN13: 9798724388566
• Release Date: March 2021
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.13 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"