Ghosts of Tomorrow by Michael R. Fletcher

The world is in crisis, polluted beyond belief. The setting is understandably dark - for a dystopian story like this to work it has to be. As the story unfolds, he learns of the depth and evil of the underworld organizations as well as the far reaching corruption that traffick scanned human minds. Griffin Dickinson is an agent of the North American Trade Union (NATU) whose job is to find the sources of the black market scans. That, as you might guess, leads to the growth of an underground market of scanned brains. The power of the human brain is such that there is huge demand for scanned brains. In other words, a person can only exist in one state - flesh or virtual. The downside is, the invasive scanning process leaves the original brain a scrambled, vegetative mass. Once in hardware, the scanned personality is virtually immortal, able to control and process the technology it is connected to.

Technology has been developed to allow the human mind to be scanned into hardware. The human mind has been established as being the most effective computing device in existence. Set in the ravaged world of 2034, 88 is the story of a technology that has been horribly corrupted.

In case my introduction wasn't enough of a hint, let me be clear, 88 is a near future, dystopian science fiction novel. Do the events, setting and technologies ring true? Could society have gone down the paths to get to that point in time? Are there still enough familiar elements to allow the reader to bridge the gap in time in his or her mind? There is a certain amount of risk to writing about the near-future.

Ghosts of Tomorrow by Michael R. Fletcher