The Zero Patient Trilogy (Book Two): (A Dystopian Science Fiction Series)

by Harmon Cooper

  The OL Officer ignores him completely.

  Zander gasps, curls up into a ball and wraps his arms around his head as Sterling delivers a series of short, punishing kicks to his legs, ribs and back. Sterling steps back to survey his handiwork and savor the moment just a bit as Zander moans and struggles to his knees.

  Hurry, we are running out of time.

  ‘You will DIE for this, South-Lover!’ Zander shrieks. ‘You, your idiot sister and your shit-eating whore False Goddess!’

  ‘I had a long speech prepared,’ Sterling states. ‘It was good, you’d have been impressed. But… ’

  In one blur of motion, he reverses his grip on the OL shiv, grabs a handful of Zander’s hair, slams the shiv into the side of his neck. For Bolt, for his mother, for Lily, for his sister – he rips the shiv out through the front. Zander tries to scream; tries to hold his neck together with scrabbling, ineffectual hands; tries to breathe and not drown in his own blood; tries to convince himself that it’s not really happening to him.

  He bleeds out in no time, collapses in a twitching, pathetic heap. Sterling stares at him for the space of half-a-dozen breaths. He sighs, kicks him to make sure, stabs him through the heart to make really sure, and then carefully wipes the shiv on one of the few remaining clean spots on Zander’s tunic.

  Halo turns to face him as he approaches. He can feel her eyes on him, even through her blinders. Beige won’t so much as look at him.

  Was it worth it? Is it enough?

  The OL Officer steps aside to let him pass.

  ‘It never is,’ he says. ‘Let’s get inside.’

  The End

  Book Three will be released at the end of 2016/beginning of 2017.

  To be the first to hear about it, click here to join my reader’s groupandtwo free books, a box set and a free series starter. For more Hunter-styled madness, go with Life is a Beautiful Thing Box Set. For action/adventure, go with The Feedback Loop. Both are free below. Easy instructions:

  1) Join the reader’s group

  2) Check your email and accept that you joined

  3) Get the books below for free!

  Back of the Book Shit

  Reader,

  You’ve made it. One more book left in the trilogy, and I guarantee the next will be a showstopper. I suppose it has to be, as I made sure I couldn’t keep writing the series by naming it a trilogy. So yes, one more part, which will likely come late Fall 2016 or Winter 2016/2017 at the latest. Follow my Amazon profile to learn of the release date.

  Inspirations and meditations

  I borrowed (or stole) many ideas in this trilogy from things that I experienced in Asia. The game of rocks that Sterling plays in Book One is an old Mongolian game that children still play in the Mongolian countryside. They also use sheep ankle bones as Hot Wheels, racing them against one another. Calling all mind freaks: you can even tell someone’s fortune using sheep ankle bones (known in their language as sharghai), but that lesson is for another day.

  The idea of a child goddess comes from Nepal, where they still worship these living deities. Similar to the Canyon, a Nepali child goddess loses her god-like nature once she has her first menstrual cycle. In 2010, I actually saw one these child goddesses in Kathmandu. A friend and I arrived at her temple and she came out onto a wooden balcony and waved at us. Once she finished, a relative rushed out with a pail asking for donations to support the goddess. The money usually goes to the men of the family and the local priests, meaning that the child goddesses are penniless once they’ve reached maturity. The idea of Halo hiding this fact about her life also stems from an account I read of a Nepali child goddess who was able to cover the fact that she’d started her cycle.

  Forehead drillers also came from Asia. ‘Trepanning’ in Buddhist culture has a long history, likely borrowed from Bön shamanism to fit the Buddhist belief of the soul leaving the body upon death. Trepanning was also practiced in South America, so it isn’t unique to Buddhism. While I’ve never met one of these modern-day forehead drillers, a former instructor of mine hosted a few in the nineties, one of which had a fresh wound. Silly Buddhists, everyone knows phowa (conscious dying) is a much easier way to make your soul leave your body as you die, much easier. ;-)

  (In an unrelated note: I lived with a Tibetan monk for a few months in Kathmandu. He was pretty damn cool, especially when he watched WWE and used the only English phrase he knew, ‘Oh my god, oh my god’ whenever someone did something risky, i.e. a chair shot.)

  Motocarts were inspired by rickshaws and other vehicles I saw in India and Nepal. Riding in a rickshaw in India is definitely something I hope to never do again. There is no concept of straight lines when it comes to Indian driving habits, so everyone converges into ‘lanes’ (a joke to call them that) any which way they’d like. My advice? Close your eyes and hold on because if you watch them drive, you’ll either get scared, sick, excited, or a weird combination of all three. It’s like the bobsled ride at an amusement park albeit on flat land instead of a downward slope.

  Nepali drivers would repurpose old plastic water bottles into horns that they could squeeze to honk. Ingenious, really. I don’t much like water bottles, not because of this, but because of another experience in the country. I will never forget crossing a bridge over an empty river completely filled with discarded water bottles. Talk about a product of human waste and drought! Dystopia exists in our world, and it’s ironic that people in the west read about it with excitement as a genre and people in other parts of the world actually live it, happily, even.

  Which brings me to America: every time I see an apparently perfectly healthy thirty-something in my current apartment complex place a single bag of trash on the hood of their vehicle and drive it fifteen meters over to the dumpster rather than simply walk it over, reminds me of just how many different lifestyles are tethered to the definition of human, and how malleable happiness is. Uppers and lowers can be anywhere, in the same home, on the same street, the same country, across the globe or hundreds of miles out at sea. Bowie-inspired query: what will poverty and social stratification be like on Mars over the next few hundred years? Will we import this? I’ll let another sci-fi writer explore that.

  Hunter and lyrics

  I felt very comfortable writing Hunter in this book and jumped right into the groove. His parts were written in a McDonald’s in Japan, in Mongolia, at the Beijing Airport and in Texas. I no longer have to get into a mood to write him – I can jump right into the psychobabble with little no concentration time, as long as I have my trigger music.

  This book is peppered with lyrics, most notably in Hunter’s parts. Can you find them? There is a lyric lifted from Radiohead’s “Everything in its Right Place.” Read closely and you’ll find not one, but two quotes from Jay Z in the text, from the songs “December 4th” and “On to the Next One”. Phil Collins makes an appearance via his song, “I Can’t Dance.” Also, the Prodigy song “Firestarter” features heavily into Hunter Part Three. There are more movie quotes and references, inserted by my certified quotemaster of an editor, George C. Hopkins. Speaking of which, he really did a damn good job of cleaning this book up for me. Go Team Venture! But seriously folks, this book wouldn’t be the same without his input and editorial guidance. Buy an editor a beer the next time you encounter one, clink your frosty-cold beer mugs with him and say, ‘This one’s for you, George.’

  Whistle while you work

  My point in using song lyrics for Hunter should be evident – Hunter speaks in song. While this has been hard for some readers to grasp, my goal with this writing style was to replicate music inside your head, to sing inside your head, if you will. I wanted to, and hope to, create a connection that is unsettling at first, but that makes more sense as the song/narrative plays out, similar to hearing a song for the first time that you will later fall in love with. That uncertainty, that trust, that reward – this is Hunter, and writing him is as frightening as it is absolutely satisfying.

  For those of you wh
o go on to recommend this trilogy to someone else, I would suggest they don’t try to decipher Hunter’s parts when they first start the trilogy; rather, his parts are supposed to be read quickly, fleetingly, if possible, so that the words trickle forward and eventually the reader understands exactly what is happening without reading word for word what is happening.

  I’ll say that in a different way – I want his portions to stain someone’s brain with broken sentences and sheer insanity until a sense of clarity is reached, a sense of understanding that one has absolutely no control, that Hunter has no control.

  A grand experiment on my part, and I really debated writing his pieces this way, but I really don’t think there is another way to write this troubled character. I will continue working on this style, likely for pair of books called Icarus Girl that I plan to release in 2017.

  Damn this was hard

  No book is easy to write. That being said, some are much easier than others. Writing my other series, The Feedback Loop, is a breeze compared to this. My cyberpunk series, Life is a Beautiful Thing, is challenging, but it doesn’t hold a candle to writing the Zero Patient Trilogy. So it was hard, and Book Three will very likely also be hard.

  The difficulty of writing this book was augmented by my personal life during the writing process. At the time that I started the book, I was on the verge of moving back to America and leaving my foreign fiancée abroad, with the plan to bring her here and marry her Stateside. What followed were several months of turmoil and personal anguish, as I became re-acquainted with the world I left behind and longed for the love of my life. Sometimes I could only write a few hundred words at a time, so worried I was by the visa process and starting over. The good news? I finished the book and my fiancé got the visa as of yesterday, May 25th, 2016. I would say something about perseverance here, but I don’t want to sound clichéd. But yes, it helps, and having a clear goal and working every day to accomplish that goal, even if it is a single brush stroke at a time, really does pay off. Still, no matter the pay off, the cost always stings.

  When in doubt, call a doctor.

  This part is for those who have theories on the Canyon and the underlying theme of this trilogy. In an e-mail to Dr. Dave, I laid out my basic outline for this novel and the world proper, including the Book. I figured I’d paste it here, edited, as pretty much sums up what I seek to do with this trilogy:

  The ZP trilogy actually started as a metaphor for humanity in general. We have our religion -- those who follow closely, those who don't; the classes of people -- those who have money, those who don't; power --those who have it, those who don't; religious fervor -- those who exhibit it, those who don't; the fact that there may be an outside force controlling what we do be it government, alien (not necessarily ET) or spiritual -- those who believe this, those who don't. Addiction -- those who have trouble handling it, those who don't.

  I thought about the American Civil War, and how a population that believed essentially the same thing can turn against one another. This can also be placed on Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, ad infinitum. It can narrow to asininity -- PC vs Apple, or terrorism, as both sides' ultimate goal is to eventually stop the other side. The Book is this item, the item on which many things pivot but in the end, is completely illusory, dust in the wind. It is the 'one thing', the Ring to Rule Them All, the Torah, the uniting and dividing factor, the winning team and it is also the dagger in the heart, the veil of the wool over the eyes, the ultimate misguider, toilet paper stuck on someone's heel. It is a controlling mechanism that gives the Canyon something to fight about, a distraction, to keep their gaze away from what is actually going on.

  This is what I mean by the 'metaphor' for humanity line.

  Truth be told, I wanted to keep the actual themes incredibly simple. I might have muddied the water with a convoluted character, Hunter, but this feels necessary in the end, as the bigger message is so simple that it would seem as if I were pandering to the reader or trying to convince them of something incredibly obvious that they likely already realize. I wanted the agenda to push itself, and once I devised the setting over the course of about six to eight months, I went about writing the story without focusing on the message and instead focusing more on the pacing, the overall narrative, the Hunter experience, the power of perspective.

  Review the trilogy.

  Please take a moment to review the trilogy, starting with Book One, if you’ve enjoyed it. Your reviews help other readers decide if they should read it or not. If you loved it, share your appreciation. If you hated it (but somehow made it to the end of Book Two), then go buy yourself a donut and skip Book Three, you’ve earned it. Thanks to the best beta reader of them all, Kay in Scotland, Ben, Dr. Dave, Dale, Sharon, Susan, Peter, Cate, Ray and to all of you who’ve reached out to me via email. The readers’ group is growing!

  Yours in sanity,

  Harmon Cooper

  writer.harmoncooper@gmail.com

  P.S. Look for Book Three later this year! To be the first to hear about it, join my reader’s group and receive a free box set and a free series starter!

  Canyon Vocabulary

  Armcuffs – restraints used for prisoner control. Locking metal clamps that fasten around the upper arm above the elbow and are linked by a short chain.

  Beard tails – chin dreadlocks.

  Bits – currency used for trade or gambling by the North and the South.

  Blackout – a wall of windblown dust that blocks out the sun.

  Blasph – blasphemous thought, person, act, word or deed.

  Blinders – eye cover worn by Halo, the Goddess of the South.

  Bullet flinger – Sterling’s word for a projectile weapon.

  Clubbing stick – offensive striking weapon similar to a riot baton or baseball bat, usually constructed from field expedient materials.

  Cover cloths – full body shawl with an attached hood. Usually worn by women.

  Dawn Prayer – Common morning prayer. Goddess I wake in the body of the Stayed to begin anew a day anew. Grant me the clarity to choose right from wrong in the name of the Stayed, the Book and you. Place your hands on my shoulders and aim me away from the path of the deathborn. For the devout I shout, for the lost I weep, for the born I mourn.

  Death Prayer – Prayer for those dying but not being raptured. Open heart and open mouth, soul take the path of the Devout. Deathborn, not I, vultured soon. Rebirth comes at the next full moon. Deathborn, not I, Goddess forgive, grievances from the times I lived. Deathborn, not I, sins escape, give me the guidance of the Devout, the Stayed.

  Deathborn – the South believes those who die without a face are deathborn; the North believes those who die with a face are deathborn.

  Delixer – bootleg alcohol.

  Depot – official distribution point for rations, water, R boots, and other commodities.

  Devout – the Priest class; the highest Canyon social group.

  Dirties – variously describes impure thoughts, words, deeds and the genitalia.

  Double – to engage in procreative activities.

  Dusk Prayer – evening prayer popular in the South. Let dusk settle and the Canyon rest, give thanks to the Goddess, the Stayed, the Devout and all the rest. Protect me in my moment of slumber; hold me to your breast. Grant me the faculty to become one of the blessed. Lead all those who stray away from deathborn. Heal the earth beneath the feet of the scorned. Mourn the passing of those faithful few, who have given their lives in devotion to you.

  Eunuched – castrated.

  Face cover – similar to a turtle neck. Covers the mouth and nose, used as a particulate filter.

  Faceless – blurred facial features. The North believes that blurred facial features are a blessing; proof that one who possesses this sign will break the cycle of rebirth and not be deathborn into the next life. The South believes that facelessness is a tangible, visible sign of sin beyond redemption in this life, and the possessor can only be deathborn to repeat the cycle. Some Southerners
also believe that facelessness is contagious.

  Finger grazers – part of a Flesh Giver’s costume: long strips of fabric attached to the fingers.

  Fleshroom – a house of prostitution.

  Flesh Dealer – one who manages a fleshroom.

  Flesh Giver – prostitute, generally dressed in the fashion of the local Goddess. Also known as Lover.

  Food – the nutrient-rich but monotonously bland, ration bars distributed by the Off Limits through the various Depots.

  Great Demarcator, The – proper name for the Off Limits.

  Khomei – from Khomeini barriers. Waist high stone pillars spaced to deny moto vehicles an unobstructed approach to the Off Limits.

  Leaks – oversized goggles/glasses.

  Learner – one who is undergoing OL mandated reeducation.

  Lottery – nominally random selection process to determine who will be sterilized; one of three methods used for population control.

  Lower – someone from the second lowest class.

  Lizard – a gambling game in which two lizards race on an enclosed track.

  Lizard luck – unexpected or unlooked-for good luck; from good luck in a game of lizard.

  Metalzip – semi-holy metallic flying insect. About the size of Specius grandus (western cicada killer) approximately 1.5 inches in length.

  Mil – term for 100 grams of alcohol.

  Mog – midnight smog.

  Moto – motorcycle with less than 50cc equivalent electric motor. Fast enough, but not powerful.

  Motocart – moto with an additional cart on back.

  Motopublic – public transportation vehicle generally used by Lowers.

  Mush – food that has been moistened, sweetened, and cooked to a porridge-like consistency.