Idea for the conflict

My main antagonist is the Mayor, and all the conflict comes from him and his crazy notion that all of his ideas are God given.

I listened to Rudy Giuliani speak a year after 911. This was in August of 2002, just under a year since 911. Rudy spoke to a crowd of about 5,000 folks. He described the events of that day and it was very emotional, everyone loved the guy, he was held in such admiration.

He told the crowd that every great leader will possess spirituality. And when you have millions of people that you’re serving, there’s a natural temptation to believe that God put you there, there must be a divine intervention. Then the tendency is to think that any gut feeling you have, gut decision, must be God’s decision.

So Rudy talked about how you have to avoid falling into that trap, you have to remain objective and realize you’re only human and they are your decisions.

I found that fascinating because I had never heard a politician talk like that.

I think there are a number of politicians in the US and abroad, recently and not, where pragmatism was nowhere to be found. I wanted to explore that in a novel. Come on, there’s all kinds of room for conflict.

Is my novel super technical?

It’s not technical, it’s credible. Think about Jurassic Park. The mosquitos landed on the dinosaurs then landed on Amber and became fossilized. Now if you can find the amber then you get to the mosquito and have dino DNA. All very credible.

So I tried to make my novel credible like that.

But the techie part is not the part that’s interesting. The social impact is the interesting part, what would this do to an individual and to society to have this ability.

Suddenly everyone has all the answers. To everything. All the time. Think about that.

Idea for my high concept

I remember sitting in a business meeting in the late 90’s. I knew the material pretty well so I didn’t fire up my laptop at the start of the meeting.. Then the customer kept drilling down and asking for facts that I didn’t have memorized. I started writing down his questions and telling him I’d get back to him. After about the 10^th question, I fired up my laptop, searched for the data, and answered his questions.

Afterwards, I thought – man, wouldn’t it be nice if I could tap into my laptop, put a little screen inside my glasses that only I could see. Boy, wouldn’t I look like a genius because no one else would be aware.

Then I thought about the social implications. I thought about meeting some girl in a bar. Cyrano de Bergerac style. Switching from scientific to philosophic to comedic mode. Having software sophisticated enough to give you the next line to anything she says or anything you hear.

How many times have you said, ‘Man, I wish I had said such and such’ after a conversation.

And I’ve always believed it’s inevitable so I finally decided to write a book about it.

What people are saying about my novel, inSyte

· A bold brazen thriller with a serious commentary on the future of information. Equal parts Crichton, Clancy and King. (Kirkus Reviews)

· Some of the scenes were so powerful I could barely catch my breath. (Susan Breen, author of The Fiction Class)

· Fight scenes are horrifying and terrific. (Lisa Reardon, author of Billy Dead)

· Riveting futuristic tale of man’s reliance on technology and what could happen if you allow it to control you. (Heather Powers, Earth’s Book Nook)

Virtual Telepathy - part 4

Think of a hydraulic suit, the kind used in the military. So called exoskeleton suits. An article from Sept 2010 demonstrated the 2^nd generation Exoskeleton (XOS 2) that allows a soldier to easily and repeatedly lift 200 pounds and punch through 3 inches of solid wood. Eventually you get to suit Sigourney Weaver used to battle the queen in 1986’s Aliens.

The you slim it down so that being paralyzed is not something you would necessarily notice.

So man is melded with machine.

And inSyte does the same for the mind. Blindness? A thing of the past. People can see now through a camera smaller than a button in resolution that exceeds natural sight because it includes infrared, a larger spectrum of light becomes visible.

No more need for flashlights for anyone.

These are physical meldings.

Mental – now you have access to everything all the time. You google as easily as you peruse your own memories.

Try to remember the lyrics to a song you used to know. You can’t quite remember so you google it.

Well, now you wouldn’t have to do that manually. Anything you think of, it’s there, in your mind. You’d soon lose the sensation that you were looking on servers. IT would all just become part of your memory.

There would be no more betting on recorded information. I’ll bet you twenty bucks the Beatles first showed up in the US in Feb 1964. Thing of the past.

You wouldn’t leave home with out it. You think you feel naked leaving your home without your cell phone? You would feel downright blind and dumb without inSyte. Flying without your instruments. Weak. Frail. Insubstantial. Incapable. Alone. Afraid.

Within 10 years clock speeds for CPU’s will catch up and surpass the speed of thought. What about within 50 years? 100 years?

Machines taking over?