Writers and Readers Network -WB

War Bug

By Biff Mitchell

Step into Biff Mitchell’s Matrix of virtual cities, virtual lives, human robots, and virtual avatars endowed with life. But here there is no legendary hero to save this world from the “War Bug.”

A DNA bubble computer the size of a period at the end of a sentence that could store trillions of times all the data on earth, the realization of what he created drove Jared over the edge. Literally. He dove over his balcony railing and broke his neck.

One-hundred-fifty years later a Virtual Code Geneticist unencrypted Jared’s encryption codes and built a working model, only to find the Powers misuse of his CityWare intolerable. So he fixed them, Oh yeah, he fixed them.

“Fly now my Angel of Death and bring the walls crumbling down.”

And he dropped the last of the files into the folder called… “War Bug”

Fifty years later things are not going so well for the Powers. They sit in their virtual control columns making up their ridiculous Reality Laws, and ensuring their continued power and control by “including” anyone who defies or questions that power. Injected with nanobots, anyone opposing them becomes little more than robots, puttering around the gardens of the city rooftops. And the Powers sit in their virtual columns pointing ineffectual fingers of blame in every direction but their own while their virtual cities fall apart. Literally. All those visiting this virtual world are dying in reality, by the millions when their online avatars are destroyed.

Abner Hayes prefers his home and family on the Net to the real world. A family he has endowed with sentient life through his own DNA studies and coding work. Now he’s terrified. Terrified he will lose them to the viral scourge that is destroying all the online cities. Terrified he will not be able to transfer them the new bubble computer he has created in time or intact. But not terrified enough.

One of the Powers has hired an evil, twisted programmer to discover the secret of the life Abner has given Claire and Cassie. They don’t particularly care that they won’t be able to sustain that life, only that they rip out the secret of it before it is terminated.

Abner knows that Claire and Cassie have little time. He doesn’t have much himself. If it means working with a psychotic, rampaging computer virus that is half the threat and appears first as a pig then a blood hound in a Sherlock Holmes outfit, well, he will do whatever it takes to ensure the survival of his wife and daughter. But will this tool of destruction help him, or destroy them all?

Despite the animated antics of the “War Bug” this is not a virus to be trifled with, nor a trifling tale for the young or faint of heart. It is action-packed, edge-of-your-seat, adult, science fiction drama crafted into plausible reality by a talented storyteller. Matrix fan or computer buff, science fiction fan or not, Mitchell has endowed his characters and his world with plausibility and life that yanks you right into his imagination and into an unforgettable virtual adventure.