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Cripple-Mode:Book Two Electric Touche
4 min read
Travis Lucia Hamilton-McQueen is a teen trapped in circumstances over which she has no control. She's awakened from a coma to a life out of control and she's trying to focus towards getting it back. It's no help that her Grandfather is a suspected mass murderer, her father is a convicted killer and she's a clone suspected of being a terrorist because she's been illegally bouncing in and out of JumpSpace. The issue of control consumes her in the light of the revelation that she may be harboring not one but three parasitic entities inside her head. Someone now expects her to do their dirty work and they won't take no for an answer.
It's the parasites, which interact with JumpSpace entity, that have created a majority of the problems in her life. She'd love to get rid of them except that there might be a fine line between these parasites and what make her what she is. These entities and their parasites have somehow written all of her father's memories into her head. She's frightened of acting against them because from all that she can tell if they leave and take the memories with them there might be nothing left of her except an empty shell. She has no recollection of her own life. She's afraid to die and has a worse fear of being alive and thrown into a darkness of nonexistence perhaps a bad as the coma she'd just come out of.
Travis has been able to survive only because of all the knowledge her father's memories have brought her. But, they have brought her some trouble also. One problem is that the memories don't contain anything about the person she is. For all intent and purposes he father knew nothing about her until his consciousness woke her up on the Medical Space Station Perl. What scares her more is that the people responsible for her creation, The clone colony collective, Special Service and League Jump Guild have some sort of agenda associated with her creation that has some sinister purpose involving the JumpSpace Entity.
Despite her misgivings she finds herself inducted into the League Jump Guild; they are the ones who control and regulate how JumpSpace is used. She has gone from being a loner to starting to surround herself with her own familial group of teachers and friends. She still has a long way to go. The temptation to let the tide of chaos around her dictate her actions is something that she's finding frustrating and difficult to fight. She must begin to take control and make her own decisions, but each step in that direction brings her in possession of more of a real life and that raises the stakes and heightens the consequences.
For Travis the question of who she is, takes second place, to should she exist? What some take as fundamental truths about the psyche and the soul are things she has to struggle with Insidious larger issues are looming ahead as she realizes that the very technology used to jump through space may be a cloned form of a living being that's much more than just an AI. If that's true then she has much more in common with it than she could ever have imagined. She'll have to ask herself would the possession of this technology by the League Jump Guild constitute slavery. That strikes the fundamental core of what Travis Lucia Hamilton-McQueen believes and she'll be faced with a decision that will impact more than her own fate.
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Birth of Cripple-Mode Series
2 min read
The Cripple-Mode Series was born somewhere in the early 1980's. It had been in my head for awhile before, just rattling around. It was somewhere near 1980 that I broke out the smith corona and started tapping away at sheet after sheet until I had the first two novels of a trilogy fleshed out. A lot of it was on the back of some scrap paper.
Then, as with many things, life sort of got in the way and took me on a wide left turn. But those two novels stayed tucked away in their briefcase through the ups and downs. All of the time I would have odd moments when I would dwell on the notion of getting back to them to whip them into shape.I mostly wrote snippets of poetry in those scattered years. And I read a large volume of science fiction.
By the mid 80s I had my first computer and was almost tempted . But, there was another left turn up ahead. It was not until the year 2000 that I got serious and looked at the old papers long enough to shake my head and decide I needed to have a back story for some of my ideas.
One of the main themes of my story involves the main characters struggle to adjust to specifically mind bending personal issues. A back story might leave that on the back burner. So I almost dropped the notion of spending a lot of time or for that matter anytime on the back story. But, I still needed to be more secure about how we got to that spot in her life. The original story took the reader half way into it before these issues even arose. It was at that point that I decided to bring the issues into the story at the very beginning.I just wasn't clear yet that this was going to be the beginning of the back story. It was not until I chose the style of writing that things began to jell and the story began to tell itself. Mind you this is all still in my head the real on paper writing doesn't start till 2006.
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