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Price, Jordan Castillo
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- Snare
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- The Starving Years
- Striking Sparks
- Stroke of Midnight
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- Tainted
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Zero Hour
Zero Hour by Jordan Castillo Price
Series: Standalone
Length: Novel - 82,000 words
Cover artist: Jordan Castillo Price
ISBN: 978-1-944779-01-6
$4.99
Also in paperback!
Summary
In a world where life is disposable, two men fight to escape oppression and find the truth…together.
Ernest just turned thirty. It’s time for retirement, freedom from the tedious drudgery of his job as a data clerk. Time to emerge from his pod and explore parts of the city he’s never seen before—to meet some actual people.
And at the end of the month? Time to die.
Will, on the other hand, has met all kinds of people in his sales career. He runs the counter at the historic coffee shop, and when he talks, he sounds just like an old-time data feed. He’s striking, charismatic, and intriguingly risqué.
According to Will, it’s possible to live much longer than the Deacons have always claimed. Ernest wants to believe the heretical notion, but what if it’s all a big scam? He might be old enough to qualify for the senior discount, but being around Will leaves him feeling painfully naive…plus a few more intense emotions that are entirely new.
Religion, medicine, government—every authority insists thirty is the end of the line, but now the seed of doubt has been planted. Can Ernest summon his inner strength and go against everything he’s been taught? He longs to flee the city with Will—but without the Deacons and their Reclaim machine, death will leave his soul trapped in a decaying body for eternity.
Zero Hour is a full length standalone novel. If you’re a fan of dystopian, post-apocalyptic MM romance, don’t miss this nail-biting tale of adventure, romance, perseverance and self-discovery.
This second edition was previously published in 2011 and contains minor text revisions.
Excerpt
Chapter One
The hatch clicked open. Ernest stepped outside his POD and took a long, deep breath. The fresh air was bracing. (That’s what they said in old-time data feeds, wasn’t it? That the air was bracing? He was fairly sure, though there was nobody nearby who could verify his impression that the air was, indeed, bracing.) “Louise,” he said. “Is the air bracing?”
“Now, I wouldn’t know about that, Ernest.”
That’s what L0U15E said every time he asked a question outside her parameters. She used to actually say, “That question is not within my parameters.” But Ernest had saved up his discretional income for nearly three months to pay for a personalized re-program of her reply.
Three months of his life was a large tradeoff for one simple sentence. But every time he heard it, he smiled. Even now. Since he enjoyed rhetorical questions, he got his money’s worth.
The historic district was fascinating. Ernest looked up one side of the street, turned, then looked down the other. The buildings were old and full of character, crafted from wood and stone and brick. They cracked here and bulged there, and some even had ivy growing up the side. Spectacular.
He gazed at a rustic crack that zig-zagged up between the bricks of a building’s foundation, and then turned toward the street. L0U15E was staring at him…he could tell. “Aren’t you going to go dock?” he asked.
“All the way over there?” An arrow appeared on the front viscreen of Ernest’s POD. “Public parking is way down at the other end of the block. Can’t we go someplace with its own POD docks?”
The “soft argue,” as it was called, was another add-on he had purchased. POD-minds were artificial intelligences with a single purpose: to run a personal overland device, and most people’s POD-minds didn’t talk back. They did what their operators told them to do unless the actions reached a certain threshold of potential harm for the owners, or for others. When L0U15E did the “soft argue,” it meant that Ernest’s action—in this case, entering a crumbling old building where she wasn’t docked into the computer system to keep track of him—had scored as moderately risky. The risk was probably mitigated by the fact that this was a public building, heavily monitored.
“Don’t worry,” he reassured her. He knew that AIs didn’t have emotions, but wasn’t assessing risk and broadcasting a warning as close to actual worry as a computer could get? “I’ll be careful.”
He could have commanded L0U15E to stop second-guessing him and go dock, but he let her sit there, parked right in the middle of the magnetic strip, and watch him go inside his very first coffee shop. If L0U15E had possessed actual emotions, maybe she’d feel proud of him for finally striking out on his own.
The front door opened for Ernest, and the smell hit him. It was strange and divine, rich and somewhat burnt. The interior was full of right angles and furniture, with philodendrons spilling from every surface. He waited for the shop’s AI to tell him what to do, figuring it was on a time-delay to give him a chance to soak up the ambiance.
The main room held five round tables with two chairs apiece. Mundane tables with no interface. Interesting. Someone could sit at one of those tables and do anything that came to his mind—anything at all.
A tiny thrill fluttered in his belly.
A few customers were packed into the right-angled corners or against the far wall, each in his or her own world. Three were hooked into portable VR units that obscured their eyes and most of their faces. Their arms and legs twitched and waved, but gave no indication as to what they were experiencing.
Another man had a hanging bag tubed into his arm-shunt. He bent over an object that it took Ernest a moment to recognize. Ernest blinked. A book! That man was reading a portable monitor shaped like a book while he had his coffee!
Ernest smiled wistfully. Coffee and a book. All that was missing was a cigarette. They’d been illegal ever since 2323, but undoubtedly someone, somewhere, could produce one—for a price.
The reading man probably had only a few more days left, judging by his parchment skin, the wispy gray of his hair and the way his head nodded along as he read.
Maybe they had cigarettes here. Or maybe a martini. Shaken, not stirred. Ernest hugged himself with glee. The coffee shop was everything he’d hoped it would be, and more. Maybe it would be worth draining the rest of his savings to see what a cigarette was all about. Or a martini. Or—
“Can I help you?”
Ernest whirled around and looked at the counter. He’d expected an AI to guide him, give him a list of choices and prices, and possibly a recommendation based on a quick scan of his public domain personality profile, but instead he found...a man.
Staring at him.
How uncomfortable.
But wasn’t that the way of things in old-time data streams? “Here’s looking at you, kid,” from a time when people did, in fact, look. At each other, no less.
“Hello?” said Ernest.
The man rolled his eyes. “Yes, I’m real. No, I’m not a holo. Yes, this is an actual coffee shop and not a historical re-creation. And no, I can’t be bothered to parse the tedious characters of your public profile to determine what it is that you want. You’re going to have to tell me.”
Ernest looked back. He figured he might as well, since he was being scrutinized himself. The man behind the counter had to be third decade if he was in a job so public, probably closer to twenty-nine than nineteen. He was tall, blond and lanky, with sinews that showed in his jaw, neck and forearms. He looked as if his feed program needed some tweaking.
“I thought you just asked if you could help me,” Ernest said.
“Figure of speech. Sort of like, ‘How are you?’ or ‘I could eat a horse.’ And no, we don’t serve horses here.”
Ernest’s head spun. He wondered if he was giddy from the bracing air he’d just inhaled. It had probably been full of all kinds of unidentified compounds.
The clerk raised an eyebrow. “First time at a shop, huh?”
Ernest nodded. “Never got out of my POD much.”
“Name’s Will.” The clerk held out his hand. His pale eyebrows tilted up as if he expected something.
Ernest stared, puzzled, until he matched the gesture with one he’d seen on an old-time feed, and then he grasped Will’s hand and pumped his arm up and down precisely three times. “I’m Ernest. Pleased to meet you.”
“First handshake?”
Ernest felt his face grow warm. “Was it that obvious?”
Will shrugged. “No, I guess not. Most virgins just stand there with their mouths hanging open and stare at my hand. At least you knew what to do. Helpful hint: don’t squeeze so tight.” He pointed at a series of screens behind the counter with lists of tiny characters and glyphs, prices beside them. “There’s the menu. I’m guessing that’s new to you, too?”
Ernest nodded.
“Take your time. I’ll clarify whatever you don’t get.”
“Could we...could we try that handshake one more time? It’s just that...you really seem to know what you’re doing.”
Will shrugged. “Whatever trips your switch.”
Ernest led this time, presenting his hand boldly.
“Other hand.”
Ernest felt his cheeks heat up again. He ignored the sensation and concentrated on learning the handshake.
Will slid his hand into Ernest’s. He moved more deliberately than Ernest had, and Ernest felt the pads of Will’s fingertips glide along his palm. A thrill raced down his spine and the tiny hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.
“Harder than that,” Will said. “Otherwise you’ll come off as a wuss.”
Ernest deduced that being a “wuss” wasn’t good. Yet another bit of data to research later. He applied more pressure to Will’s hand. “Nice,” Will purred. “Now shake it like you’re not counting. And vary the height a little.”
Ernest did his best to be random. It was easier than he would have thought. He was so focused on the feel of Will’s hand inside his that he’d forgotten how to count as high as three.
“And there you go,” Will said. He let go of Ernest’s hand, which now felt completely foreign. “Just like something out of a paperback novel.”
“A what?”
“Never mind. C754s are supposed to be smart. I thought you’d parse the reference.”
“A novel? As in a book? On paper? Paper-back. Paperback. Yes. What’s the rest of it made from?”
Will leaned over the counter on both hands as if he was about to divulge a great secret. Ernest leaned forward and met him halfway. Will pressed his mouth to Ernest’s hair just beside his ear and whispered.
“Paper.”
Ernest straightened back up, disgusted. He hadn’t come to the coffee shop to be mocked. He’d come for coffee. “Very funny.”
“You don’t believe me? But it’s true. All the books upstairs are made from paper…and maybe a little glue and ink.”
Books. Actual books. Upstairs. Ernest had scanned feeds about bibliophiles cracking open the spine of a freshly bound book—which sounded incredibly violent, yet somehow satisfying—and breathing deep of the “new book smell.”
He supposed that Will’s books wouldn’t smell like that anymore, not after centuries of...what did books do? They moldered. Not after centuries of moldering.
Unless they’d been sealed, preserved somehow.
“What do they smell like?”
Will’s eyebrows twisted up and he...what was that called? Smiled? Grinned? Smirked? “Not like anything your POD can synth up, that’s for sure.”
Ernest would need to access the feeds on facial expressions if he wanted to get through the next twenty-nine days with any comprehension whatsoever of what was going on around him. He felt a pang. It made no sense. It was several hours until his next meal was scheduled. So why the...longing?
“Same for the coffee,” said Will. That was probably a smirk, Ernest decided. “Some things just can’t be replicated by nanos. So, what’ll it be?”
“Can I see the books?”
Will’s eyebrows plunged low, forming a straight line over the top edge of his eyelids, with a vertical crease dead center. “Top floor’s for customers only. You understand. Gotta make a living.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course.” He’d need to order. That was what he’d come for anyway, wasn’t it? The coffee: mythic elixir, beverage of commoners and kings. He tore his gaze away from Will’s eyebrows and looked back at the LCD board, with its singles and doubles, mochas and lattes. Someone might as well have handed him a schematic and told him to build his own POD. “Um…Will…Not that I expect you to analyze my public profile, but based on your own experience, what would you recommend?”
“That depends on how much you wanna spend. We got hypos. We got IVs. Of course, if you’re really flush, I can set you up a brew.”
Ernest’s attention snapped back to Will. “Brew? You mean, to drink?”
Will waggled his eyebrows.
Ernest guessed that was a yes.
Reviews
Will recognizes in Ernest some potential, and with some good placed inputs, insinuates in him the desire to “taste” the life, and it’s not a metaphor, Ernest was fed through a shunt in his arms, no solid or liquid food at all, nothing through his mouth. When he meets Will, there will be a lot of things he will learn to do with his mouth, not only eat: taste, kiss, and many, many other pleasurable activities. Elisa Rolle