Acts of the Apostles by John F.X. Sundman is available on Kindle for just $2.99.
Description:
March 1990: American-led forces assemble in Saudi Arabia for "Desert Storm", the largest military operation since the Normandy Invasion. Meanwhile, across the globe in Massachusetts, in a former textile mill that's been converted to the home of legendary computer company Digital Microsystems, computer chip designer Todd Griffith is working past dark during a late winter snowstorm, trying to find out why his "Kali" chip keeps randomly messing up. After working without sleep for 3 days, Todd discovers a secret function hidden among the hundreds of thousands of microscopic transistors-- clearly sabotage. He calls his boss in California to report his discovery, then leaves the Mill and walks home through a blizzard. Seven hours later Todd is shot in the head as he lies sleeping in his bed.
December, 1995: After a grueling week in the Silicon Valley fast lane, burnt-out bi-coastal software engineer Nick Aubrey, Todd’s best friend, boards a "red-eye" flight to Boston and winds up seated next to a very disturbed man who claims to know the secret of Gulf War Disease, a mysterious ailment afflicting thousand of Desert Storm veterans & which the government denies even exists. Over Utah, Nick's chance companion meets his dramatic demise and the police suspect Nick of murder. Soon everybody wants a piece of Nick--from the Salt Lake City Airport police to the CIA, from billionaire venture capitalists and paranoid cybermilitiamen to end-of-the-millennium cultists and exotic foreign beauties. The only person who doesn't want a piece of Nick is his distant wife, a beautiful biologist with a secret or two of her own.
In freeing himself from a web of murder, deceit and double-crosses, Nick comes to learn that the key to the secret of Gulf War Syndrome (and, as it turns out, the real reason behind George W. Bush's war on Iraq 13 years later) resides in a pharmaceutical laboratory in Basel Switzerland, where scientists are frantically working on submicroscopic machines to rearrange human DNA and make possible, among other things, remote mind control. When their work is done, the Gulf War will look like child's play. Only Nick can stop them. But first he's going to have to find the Trojan horse hidden in the Kali computer chip. He can't do that without the help of his friend Todd, and Todd's been in a coma for nearly half a dozen years.
December, 1995: After a grueling week in the Silicon Valley fast lane, burnt-out bi-coastal software engineer Nick Aubrey, Todd’s best friend, boards a "red-eye" flight to Boston and winds up seated next to a very disturbed man who claims to know the secret of Gulf War Disease, a mysterious ailment afflicting thousand of Desert Storm veterans & which the government denies even exists. Over Utah, Nick's chance companion meets his dramatic demise and the police suspect Nick of murder. Soon everybody wants a piece of Nick--from the Salt Lake City Airport police to the CIA, from billionaire venture capitalists and paranoid cybermilitiamen to end-of-the-millennium cultists and exotic foreign beauties. The only person who doesn't want a piece of Nick is his distant wife, a beautiful biologist with a secret or two of her own.
In freeing himself from a web of murder, deceit and double-crosses, Nick comes to learn that the key to the secret of Gulf War Syndrome (and, as it turns out, the real reason behind George W. Bush's war on Iraq 13 years later) resides in a pharmaceutical laboratory in Basel Switzerland, where scientists are frantically working on submicroscopic machines to rearrange human DNA and make possible, among other things, remote mind control. When their work is done, the Gulf War will look like child's play. Only Nick can stop them. But first he's going to have to find the Trojan horse hidden in the Kali computer chip. He can't do that without the help of his friend Todd, and Todd's been in a coma for nearly half a dozen years.
From the Reviewers:
"'Acts of the Apostles' is a nanotech science-fiction thriller packed with everything you would expect a hardcore geek to like. But it's also a book infused with a sensibility that you don't normally expect a 'hard science fiction' novel to have: real emotions, real heartbreak and a real sense of the craziness at the core of the human condition."
--Salon.com
"I have the very definite feeling that this is a book which will be read in 50 or 100 years from now, in the way that we now read books such as The War of the Worlds, 1984,and Brave New World."
--Michael Allen, AKA England's "Grumpy Old Bookman"
--Salon.com
"I have the very definite feeling that this is a book which will be read in 50 or 100 years from now, in the way that we now read books such as The War of the Worlds, 1984,and Brave New World."
--Michael Allen, AKA England's "Grumpy Old Bookman"
About the Author:
John Sundman is the author and publisher of the cyber-nano-biopunk novels Acts of the Apostles, Cheap Complex Devices, and The Pains, and has been called "the future of printed fiction" by cyberpunk celebrity Bruce Sterling. John has been a manager of technical publications and software engineering in Silicon Valley and Boston, a long-haul truck driver, a construction lumper, and a famine relief worker in west Africa. He resides on the island of Martha's Vineyard where he's a volunteer firefighter and food pantry worker.
Follow John Sundman on Twitter: @jsundmanus.
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