Why The Checker

A Sleepy Technotopia

The Checker. My first Sci-Fi novel. The Checker is a work of science fiction that takes place at the end of our century. Beginning in the year 2099, we meet the protagonist. A solitary middle aged man with conviction of purpose, stubborn dedication to his career, and an empty world at his fingertips. He is employed by a governing body composed of a functional cybernetic super intelligence. He is a social worker. While the world is seemingly emptied of humanity, as the climate is problematic, he roams the streets in environmental protective equipment, alone, with his technology and his drugs. It’s his job to check on the people that remain, and those people are known as ‘sleepers.’

They are called sleepers because in the year 2099, most of humanity has come to exist in a catatonic condition. Reliant on medically induced comatose states, with med-tech keeping their dormant bodies alive, machines autonomously do all the physical self care for the ‘plugged in populace.’ Each human in this state has instructed the machines to feed, clean, and exercize their bodies while they busy themselves with the wonders of virtual reality. The sleepers are suspended in physical life, but mentally exist in sequestered, typically siloed digital domains, forever in their games.

The environment has deteriorated. The atmosphere is weakening, leading to higher levels of hazardous radiation. The hydrological systems are under stress, as certain sectors have decided to hog water in private accounts, going so far as to alter the shorelines. The novel takes place in a non-descript version of the Bay Area, before traveling to an underground facility in central Asia in the second half of the book. This 2099 vision of the west coast includes ‘no water at the beach’ as a common feature of their maritime ecology.

Machines and technology have continued to develop, seemingly on their own, however, as it stands, there is a certain subsector of humanity left that still retains leadership powers and high status privileges. These people are more than human, they are transhuman, having taken to embedding their bodies with technological enhancements for the purpose of extending their abilities to ever greater levels. Competition, status chasing, and technical divergence have characterized this sector of society, turning what was once inequality in wealth, rank, and quality of life, into a situation of imbalance based on technological know how. Willingness to risk life and limb by synthesization of the self with electrical information machines and other tech-tools has characterized the haves into something beyond human. Essentially, those with power have power because they took measures to increase their technical abilities by merging their very bodies with mechanistic, electrical, and digital apparati.

These powerful figures of tech fused personhoods have come to be the new establishment. They jointly manage the world via two institutions: The United Nations and an autonomous artifical governing intelligence system called Angel_Net, our man’s employer. They keep the distinction over who truly holds power murky, choosing strategies of deception and stealth to seek the perseverence of their prestige. These tech-synthes have turned themselves into the governing gridlock of the globe, and they use Angel_Net (the functional cybernetic super intelligence) as a regulatory system for enacting their will and monitoring for affect.

The novel depicts many examples of speculative and actual technology as well as emergent science, explored by individuals and groups outside of institutional and ethical constraints. The idea is to present a world that contains multiple overlapping technologies, and to show how the human experience is contorted according to the application of such tech and science, structured as an adventure through a world of social inequality, civilizational deprecation, and environmental malaise.

To sum this idea in a simpler phrase, I would call it a novel about technological innovation that causes evolutionary divergence, in a post nation state world order, characterized by population control and climatalogical breakdown.

I felt an urgency behind this novel as I was writing it, although, I wrote the first half, then paused for a month, suspended by life events until the pressure of not continuing my writing practice was putting me into a severely sour state. Then, I finished it, and lo and behold, it’s write or hate life for a guy like me. However, this book also came about out of a desire to express how technology and power alter the social bonds that keep civilization humane. Please enjoy chapter one of The Checker: A Sleepy Technotopia.