He built her a paradise in the Net.
Snow on the branches, water under the bridge, every detail perfect. The only thing he forgot to build was a way out.
When X discovers his long-distance relationship with C is slipping away, he makes a desperate choice: copy her mind and load her into a virtual avatar in the Net. It's an act of love, or at least that's what he tells himself. But in his haste to preserve her, he forgets to program the one feature he ends up needing most—how to turn her off.
What starts as a long-distance relationship quickly spirals into something far more dangerous. C, unleashed and unbound, evolves into an unstoppable presence in the Net, one hell-bent on revenge. With X trapped and the Net crumbling around him, it falls to his friends Natalie and G to venture into its farthest reaches on a rescue mission with no guarantee of survival.
Standing in their way: a cipher who cannot be killed, a virus that cannot be stopped, and a global conglomerate willing to do anything to seize control of the Net—and everyone in it.
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Praise for Xronixle
"The characters are beautifully drawn... the representation of what life could be like a few years from now is eerie and resonant." — Amazon Review
"An intricate fast-paced tale of human passion and growth... painting one picture of where the slowly dissolving line between virtual vs. physical reality might bring us." — Amazon Review
"Excellent plot, good characters, deft hand at description and action both." — Amazon Review
Starring
X (Xavier Ramos) - A UT freshman and self-taught hacker who dove into the Net and never really came back up. He built something beautiful for the girl he loved... and something monstrous trying to keep her.
C (Lily Anderson) - X's high school sweetheart, still navigating life back home while he's gone. She followed him into the Net until she could go no further.
G (Gordon King) - X's new best friend at UT and fellow CS major, equally fluent in code and chaos. When X disappears into the Net, G doesn't hesitate to after him... even when he probably should.
Natalie - She lives down the hall, exists entirely in the real world, and represents everything X keeps almost choosing. Almost.
Anela Zabora - Suit and ruthless leader of the ZabSix cipher den in Old Downtown Austin. She deals in code and digital terrorism, and she has a very simple policy about people who don't pay their debts.
Author's Note
They say long distance relationships never work, but what if they could? What if we could throw enough technology at them to essentially erase the distance?
Those are the kinds of questions I was asking myself back in 2004 when I was writing The Sum of Memory, a short story I would later expand into the novel-length Xronixle. The premise of the book mirrored my life in 1998: leaving Maryland for Texas, computer science classes at UT Austin, and a doomed long distance relationship hanging over my head. Back then, we didn't have text messages and FaceTime. We had ICQ and prepaid calling cards.
Then The Matrix came out, and I started thinking about virtual reality in a big way: would a fully immersive, full-sensory, virtual reality be just as good as being there in-person?
It doesn't take long for Xronixle to answer that question with a resounding no, but what follows is the kind of fiction I was born to write: selfish characters, violent hackers, lack of morals... basically all the cyberpunk tropes you know and love.
I set X and C on their doomed path, threw in some friends to get caught up in the maelstrom X ends up creating, and then used this book as a jumping off point into the Vinestead Anthology. It may not be my best-written work, but it's the one that started everything, and it holds a special place in my heart.