First and foremost, I must thank my wife, Maureen, for her endless support and enthusiasm for this project. She is an inspiration, and I would be lost without her.
I also must thank the fine folks at Red Adept Publishing for their amazing editorial support. Lynne McNamee runs a fine ship and her help was invaluable. I owe a lot to the attention of Laura Koons, Sarah Borroum, and Stefanie Spangler Buswell, and their keen eyes. They helped me at each step of the way with editing and proofreading, and worked diligently to make this book better with each draft.
Glendon and Tabatha Haddix at Streetlight Graphics knocked this book into proper form for the publication of both the print and electronic editions. If first impressions are everything, they helped make sure I was putting my best foot forward with their beautiful cover design and formatting. Their work has been invaluable.
I should also take a moment to thank the fine folks at Amazon for hosting the 2013 Breakthrough Novel Award, and the reviewers who helped an earlier, and much less polished, version of this manuscript earn a spot in the quarterfinals. Thanks also to Publisher’s Weekly for their glowing review of that earlier draft. Without the support and kind words from these judges and critics, Convergence may have been lost in the clutter of my hard-drive for good. Instead, they provided me with a much needed morale boost and allowed me the confidence to move forward with publication.
And, of course, thanks to my wonderful family and friends for their words of encouragement and praise along the way. They helped keep me sane and confident, which takes no small measure of effort.
Other Works
Convergence
Consumption (A Short Story)
No Way Home (contributing author)
Emergence
About the Author
Michael Patrick Hicks is the author of the science fiction novel Convergence, an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award 2013 Quarter-Finalist. He is also the author of the short horror story, Consumption, and his work appears in the science fiction anthology, No Way Home. He lives in Michigan and is hard at work on his next story.
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About Emergence
Still recovering from the events that befell her in Los Angeles, Mesa Everitt is learning how to rebuild her life.
The murder of a memorialist enclave changes all of that and sets into motion a series of violence that forces her into hiding.
Hunted by a squad of corporate mercenaries, with the lives of her friends and family in danger, Mesa has no one to turn to, but she holds a dark secret inside her skull. She has no knowledge of that secret, but it is worth killing for.
The ghosts of her haunted, forgotten past are about to emerge.
Available Now
Read on for an excerpt…
Chapter 1
Sex and death flowed freely, amped up across the nightclub’s bio-fi. The emotions and sensations were intoxicating. The music was loud; the bodies, sweaty. Strangers ground against one another, riding the waves of euphoria.
Mesa Everitt felt a body press against her, and she tilted her hips back, swiveling her waist, waving her hands above her head. The response was instant, and she smiled, leaning her weight against the handsome stranger. With a sloppy-drunk grin plastered on his face, her boyfriend, Kaizhou, watched Mesa dancing. Eyes wide, pupils small, he enjoyed the show. Then he stepped up and embraced her, stealing her back from the strange man.
“This is amazing,” she said.
His tongue flicked against hers, nearly in sync with the strumming pound of an electric cello and the blasted riff of a synthetic piano. She locked her arms around his neck, staving off a wave of dizziness. Strange hands moved across her hips, but she didn’t care. Couldn’t care.
Watching, their friend Jade danced with an easy rhythm, her skin glistening under the pulsating lights. She disappeared briefly as a wave of artificial smoke crossed over her. Moving bodies generated air currents strong enough to part the foggy vapor before it could fully enshroud her. In those few seconds of her slight disappearance, she had found a companion.
Center stage, on a large floating platform above them, Muzyakimo Aki sang. His voice was powerful for such a slim, meek-looking man. He wore thick black frames, and his hair had been dyed multiple colors—purple, yellow, and red—against his natural black. His eyebrows were bushy, nearly a unibrow, and his gaunt face was pockmarked. But his voice… the rich timbre lulled listeners, ensnaring them in a rapture that demanded attention and seriousness. Like Aki himself, his music was a study of contrasts. Every verse, every chorus, each solo, and the chords themselves meant something different to each listener.
The DRMRs on the dance floor were transmitting freely, their lithe figures awash in the experiences of varied pasts. For the last hour and a half, Mesa had been submerged in the lives of others. Aki’s music pulsed through her, and she swam through the crowd’s associated memory cues streaming across the bio-fi. The sadness and joy of more than a hundred strangers pushed through her DRMR implant. She mourned the loss of a beloved pet then was caught up in the throes of a first orgasm and the loss of virginity. She felt the pride of a first A in school and the crushing defeat of a first F after the tedium of studying for a complex exam. She remembered the first time this particular Aki song came across the entertainment comm, but only a snippet had played before Mom interrupted with a list of chores. Then she shared outrage over illegal whale hunts and fishery raids by corpo suits, and Aki’s music was very nearly a call to arms.
She soaked up the experiences and memories, none of them hers.
Onstage, the synthetic dancers bumped and ground, dancing against one another. They were older models, appearing human in only the most superficial ways. With slender arms and legs, as well as jointed fingers and toes, the dancers were clearly artificial. Inhuman. Their skin was shiny egg-white plastic moldings, and a cool electric-blue ring encircled their cybernetic eyes. Facial features were barely defined. Their designer had instead opted for the subtle impression of a face pressed into smooth, flat planes. The aesthetic was both undeniably beautiful and disconcerting. The dancers were logged in to the bio-fi feed, and their mimicry captures were set to resemble movements of people in the crowd. They danced with cybernetic abandon but with a computerized off-set that forced a stutter to their steps.
For a brief, halting moment, Mesa rose above the crowd, her mind soaring higher than those around her. She could see the flashes of memory, the pattern of convergence that roped through each individual soul, tying one to another. The sight was electrifying and beautiful. Their thoughts jived against the laser-light show. Bodies slammed against one another; others held embraces. Slick human machines slid against one another, exchanging kisses and sweat, running fingers through the hair of strangers. Their subconscious echoed against the synthpop of Aki’s performance, the wails of electronic guitars, and the random interruptions of found noises turned into hyper-idealized artificialities. Mesa floated, briefly ethereal, long enough to see the man at the center of the convergence. Like a hollow void, he was disconnected from those around him. A black ember burning brightly, Muzyakimo Aki united everyone around him, yet stood apart from them all. Nothing flowed from or through him. He was a jetty, an interjection in the center of the convergence.
Hands slid up Mesa’s flanks, and her mouth pressed tightly against Kaizhou’s, their tongues exploring one another’s. He held her with a promise to never let go. Discerning the flow of his memories from the tangled current of everyone else’s was impossible.
She had tried posh a year ago and marijuana the year before that. Neither was remotely similar to the rush of hundreds of souls and thousands of memories amp
lified through the bio-fi’s feedback loop. She’d been high before, but the euphoria she felt at that moment was… exciting. She was truly high.
Jade had joined them at some point. Mesa blinked with languid slowness, taking Jade’s arm and pulling her closer, so that both Jade and Kaizhou hugged her. Mesa enjoyed being between them, and she laughed as Jade’s companion pressed his way in, nuzzling at Jade’s long, glistening neck.
The percussions drove on, deeper and deeper, pulsing harder and harder. The concussive shockwave of sound slowly degraded into a shrill siren before giving way to pure silence. A thin skein of fog blanketed the crowd as the lights powered down, plunging the club into darkness. And then the crowd exploded in cheers, screams, and applause. The dim houselights slowly warmed up, and beneath their soft glow, Aki waved at the crowd and nodded. He turned sharply and strode offstage without a word.
“That was amazing,” Mesa said again. She wiped a bright-red streak of hair away from her eyes, pushing the trails of natural black behind her ears.
She was sweaty and high, and her heart was hammering. She’d been dancing for two hours, and her throat was tight and sore from screaming along to the music and cheering for Aki. Her words were a harsh whisper, difficult to edge past her lips. She was exhausted and energized to the point of being hyper.
Fingers danced up her arm, and she met the smiling face of Jade’s companion.
“Cool tattoo,” he said, his index and middle finger slicking away the sweat as his digits traced the curve of a thick green dragon tail as it wrapped around a Gaelic cross.
“Thanks,” she said, her throat constricting against the word in painful defiance. It came out husky and hollow. She tilted her body slightly away from him, leaning into Kaizhou enough to make it clear she didn’t want this stranger touching her. More, she didn’t want to discuss the tattoo.
Her arm was a sleeve of color, but she didn’t remember getting the tattoo. She didn’t know why she had it or what it meant. And the why of all that was a whole other story she didn’t want to go into. Not there, not after Aki’s performance. She was already feeling the come-down, and she knew the stranger’s questions would make things worse and leave her uncomfortable.
Her fingers laced between her Kaizhou’s, she said to him, “Let’s go.”
Jade was lost in the attentions of her companion, but Mesa nudged her anyway and tugged at her fingers.
“You coming?”
Jade’s free hand was lost in the long hair of the man suckling at the joint of her neck and shoulder. She smiled and promised, “I’ll catch up later.” She gave Mesa’s hand a squeeze goodbye then turned to face the man behind her to continue their familiarization.
The crowd was slowly thinning, but the bar and dance floor were still crowded. The club stank of sweat, spilt booze, and reefer. The floor was tacky. Mesa and Kaizhou jostled their way to the exit, shimmying between couples, gently pushing around others. Cold air blasted their hot bodies as they stepped outside. The physical force drew their breath away and frosted it in the early morning air.
In the clear sky, bright stars and a full moon illuminated Mount Rainer in the distance, and closer, the Space Needle and the Seattle skyline glowed.
“That’s fucking beautiful,” Mesa said.
Kaizhou followed her gaze. Neither ever tired of the view. He took her in his arms and kissed her bare shoulder. She tilted her head so that their temples touched. A small sigh of happiness blossomed into a white puff before her lips.
“You OK?” he asked.
She slipped her hand into the back pocket of his jeans, warming her palm against the curve of flesh beneath the thin fabric. “Yeah, I’m good.”
She traced the outlines of the stars, making imaginary constellations, connecting them across time and distance. She was the center of that convergence, with Kaizhou beside her. Somehow, some way, she imagined it all connecting back to Muzyakimo Aki, drawing him into her web and unraveling his secrets. Onstage, the man had been an inspiring enigma, and standing in the middle of the sidewalk outside the club, she dreamed of connecting with him, pouring her hopes into him, and pulling from him all of the details of his life so that she might wrap herself in his purpose and find an aim in life.
“You sure you’re all right?”
Her gaze, far-off and distant, snapped back into focus. Her eyes drew a bead on Kaizhou. She gave him a smile that washed away the troubled expression on his face, forcing a grin out of him.
Playfully, she squeezed his bottom. “I’m fine,” she said.
He leaned close, nose to nose with her. Their smiles widened, and for that evening at least, she found purpose.
Later, she quietly disentangled herself from sodden bedsheets. Warm air blew from the ducts, but by the time it reached her, it felt cool against her bare, sweat-slicked skin. She wrapped herself in a chenille blanket and curled up in the plush leather chair in Kaizhou’s living room, hugging her legs close and resting her chin against the peaks of her kneecaps. She could make out the muffled sounds of his snores through the thin walls of the small apartment.
The emotional ecstasy from Aki’s concert was dissipating, and she was crashing back to the baseline of normalcy. The emotional low bordered on depression simply because the highs of the night had been so far above. Such was the risk one bore for attending an Aki performance with guards willfully down to allow the bio-fi amplifiers unrestricted access to the DRMR enhancements. The memory was a powerful, jolting surge, exhausting in its exactness, and she didn’t risk replaying it.
No matter how well one’s memories were stored and replayed, they never captured the lived experience exactly due to the lack of amplification. Anybody who’d been to one of Aki’s shows understood that risk, and all others were befuddled. The memories were a one-off, stored for enjoyment and reminiscing, but never replayed because the replay was hollow and untrue, cheapening the individual experience.
She wiped away a tear, grateful for the memory and its freshness. The memory was truly her own, even if she lacked a wealth of experiences from which to draw cues and associations while lost in the throes of Aki’s music. She cried softly, but the tears were not of sadness.
She knew she couldn’t go home in her wrecked state. Her nerves needed to settle, and the jitters needed to pass.
Sporadic traffic passed below, separated by long intermissions. The dull rhythm was enough to make her eyes heavy then lull them closed.
“Hey, wakey-wakey,” Kaizhou said, squeezing her shoulders. His thumbs made slow, long circles along the muscles above her collarbones. The massage was enough to wake her and pleasing enough to keep her eyes shut.
“But I don’t wanna,” she said, mumbling the childish mantra and exaggerating her sleepiness. The daylight surprised her. Kaizhou stood next to her, still naked. She kissed his hipbone and buried her face against his belly, breathing in his scent.
Slowly, Mesa unfolded herself from the chair, keeping herself wrapped up in the blanket, adoring its soft gentle comfort against her body. She gave him a peck on the cheek as she passed then began rounding up the trail of errant clothes.
She frowned at the previous evening’s mini-skirt and halter top. The outfit was fine for a late night of clubbing but not exactly appropriate morning wear if she wanted to avoid the walk of shame.
“I’m borrowing some sweats,” she called out as she pulled the drawstrings tight. Then she lost herself in one of his baggy University of Washington sweatshirts.
In the bathroom, she combed back her hair and let it fall over her shoulders. She studied her reflection, pleasantly surprised by what she saw. The smart-mirror flashed a quick “GOOD MORNING.” Then the default presets loaded unobtrusively along the side and bottom: the weather forecast—cloudy, fifty-six, seventy percent chance of rain after 6 p.m.—stock reports, and a news ticker accompanied by a talking head who delivered the top news stories. Mesa turned on the water faucet, and the sink’s biometrics measured her temperature and pulse rate. The data
presented itself on the bottom-right corner of the mirror, next to a pulsating, bright-red heart icon. It told her she was in excellent health for a woman in her early twenties.
Emotionally and mentally, she had reached her baseline of normalcy, and she felt surprisingly good. Her earlier breakdown after the high was fading, clouded over by the memories of better feelings. A fullness had engulfed her and made her content. The only thing missing was coffee.
The door of the flat opened with a protesting squeal. The noise was enough to wake Jonah from his stupor. Mesa met his frown with an apologetic smile.
“I was getting worried,” he said, pushing himself into a seated position on the sofa. “You didn’t call.”
Mesa felt her cheeks flush with guilt. “I’m sorry. I got wrapped up in my night out.”
“You know I worry about you, right?”
“Yeah, Dad, I know. I’m sorry.”
“You need to be careful out there.”
“I know. I said I’m sorry.” She talked over her shoulder, moving into the kitchen, both hands wrapped around a cup of Morning Java blend.
“You need to call me when you’re going to be out all night.”
“Look,” she said, “I told you I’m sorry. Move on.”
She tossed the plastic lid in the recycler then took a deep breath of the coffee’s aroma, letting the steam warm her face.
“I needed a night out. That’s all. Needed to have some fun.” She sat next to him, tucking her legs beneath herself.
“I get that,” he said. His hunt for the next words was plainly difficult.
Mesa’s therapist had suggested they learn better communication skills and encouraged them to be open with one another. Open lines of communication would be difficult for both of them, the doctor had said, but being honest about their feelings and speaking freely without worry of judgment was necessary. Jonah had taken the message to heart. Still, it never came easy. He was a buttoned-up sort.
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