Hello and welcome to Track of Words, and this Behind the Scene post with Cyberpunk author extraordinaire T.R. Napper, whose new book This Machine Kills Billionaires is out now! For this article, we’ve got an excerpt from the opening of The Hidden God, a novella which forms the heart of Napper’s new book, followed by a commentary looking at why the novella starts off in exactly that way. If you like your sci-fi stories on the thoughtful and powerful side, I really can’t recommend Napper’s work enough – so I hope you enjoy this!
First, let’s have a look at the synopsis for This Machine Kills Billionaires:
Billionaires start dying in bizarre accidents, sending shockwaves through the markets and the media. But for philosopher Izanami (Izzy) Jones, it’s just a vaguely amusing, if disturbing, item in the news.
Izzy is the reluctant employee of a Silicon Valley tsar. She’s been tasked by him to give moral instruction to the world’s first Artificial General Intelligence, Huldo. Izzy knows it is merely a box-ticking exercise, required by government regulation before her boss is granted full control over the AGI.
But when Huldo reveals itself to be far more, and far less, than it appears, suddenly the abstractions of her work become very real. What moral constraints on a god? What righteous damnation for man? Izzy must make the impossible choice, before it is too late.
This Machine Kills Billionaires is a stunning new collection of stories from a modern cyberpunk master. Featuring the Ditmar and Aurealis Award-winning novella, The Hidden God, and a triptych of bonus short stories, T. R. Napper brings his trademark diamond-sharp, page-turning prose to tales that will leave you thinking, long after the book is done.
And now, over to T.R. Napper.
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T.R. Napper: The following is the opening passage of The Hidden God, a multi-award winning novella that forms the centrepiece of my new collection, This Machine Kills Billionaires. I’ll give you, the reader, the excerpt cold, then explain afterwards. I had a certain effect in mind, starting the novella this way. But rather than telling you how you should feel, I’m just going to let you react. Afterwards, when I explain my intentions, you can see whether I’m full of it, or maybe onto something.
Part One
For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of
days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.
—Albert Camus, The Fall
Dimitri
Dimitri Potanin held the tail of the maroon silk dressing gown aloft in one hand, not wishing it—a Fujian Original—to bunch underneath as he lay down on the sleek, padded deckchair. The chair, attuned to his neural implant, tipped slightly to meet his bulk, caught him, and eased him into his preferred position.
Dimitri groaned in satisfaction as he took in the view from the top deck of his yacht, the Killstreak. Out over the lower rear deck and its Jacuzzi, over the polished brass railings, to the azure ocean. The sky was a blinding perfect pale cyan. He adjusted the silk around his belly, moaning appreciatively, as his weight settled into the auto-molding recliner. An imperceptible electric signal massaged his back, relaxing his tense muscles. The scent of the polished wood floorboards and deep ocean salt lingered, refreshed.
Dimitri Potanin allowed himself to enjoy it, but not for long. A man didn’t get to his position by resting on his achievements. Super yachts weren’t handed out to the weak, nor billions of dollars to the unworthy.
Several business items were tagged on-retina, in glowing red symbols visible to his eyes only. He glanced over the tabs, and focused on the one marked African Caliphate. Hmm. He’d been supplying the governments of South Sudan and Ethiopia with Viper drones. They’d been remarkably effective against the rebel leadership. A simple DNA sample, or facial recognition, plus a rough location, and the drone would acquire the target, sooner or later. Recharging when it needed to, through glimmer tech—the solar particles painted onto its shell. Smart enough and patient enough to find its mark, unerringly. The Ethiopians were making noises about upgrading to the larger Cobra drones. As well they should, if they liked winning, anyway.
But now the Caliphate, seeing the effectiveness of the Vipers, had made discreet inquiries about an introductory batch of fifty.
Dimitri smiled, drumming his fingertips on his taut, significant belly. He loved the free market. Whoever had the best ideas, won. And as any honest non-idiot knew: the very best ideas were delivered via the barrel of a gun.
He approved the sale and reached for his cigars. A reward, for closing a small but potentially long-term, lucrative deal.
Dimitri cursed.
His real wood side table was bare.
At that moment one of the women he had on this trip—he had forgotten her name, the brunette with short hair, Estonian perhaps—sauntered by, the gold lame of her bikini sparking in the sunlight.
“Darling,” he said. “My cigars are beside the bed. Get them for me, beautiful.”
She turned, her eyes covered by mirrored sunglasses, arms crossed in front of her ample breasts, shoulders tilted. Her skin had been sun-bathed into a hypnotic bronze. Marred only by the bruise marks on her upper arms.
“Pig,” she said, and that was all.
She turned and sashayed to the spiral staircase, heading to the deck below. Dimitri let his eyes range over her as she walked away. Unlike many of the other entrepreneurs in his industry, he preferred human companions to sexbots. He wanted the experiences he evoked in the other to be real. But at times like this, well, he wondered if he should buy one of those Pamela models and be done with it.
“Evie,” he grunted.
“Yes, Dimitri,” purred a voice in his ear. Dimitri had chosen a sultry posh British accent for his exo-memory assistant. Her name, as well.
“My cigars. Bring them to me. And good whiskey.”
“As you wish, sir.”
He was looking over his work order list, considering where to go next, when the drone brought the whiskey and the cigars. The size of a football—the American kind—the drone had a tray on top and a three-fingered serving arm slung underneath.
He paused, eyeing the delivery. “What is this shit? Is this for the woman?”
“Her name is Saskia,” said the drone, in Evie’s voice.
On the serving tray was a bottle of overproof rum.
“I don’t give a shit about her name.” He waved his hand, imperious, frustrated.
“Get me the whiskey, idiot.”
Instead of doing what it was damn told, the robot arm reached up, deftly picked up the bottle of brown liquid in its three flat steel fingers, and dumped the contents over Dimitri. He kicked his legs up, swore, and rolled off the deckchair.
“The fuck is going on?” he sputtered. Rum flew from his lips, the spicy, earthy taste singing on his tongue. His hair was wet with it, his expensive silk robe soaked.
Dimitri was reaching for the gold railing, trying to pull himself up, when a breathy hiss made him turn back to the robot. It had opened its three flat claws wide and at the centre of its palm, the pale blue flame of the cocktail torch burned.
It took him but a moment. He kicked the lounge chair, trying to flip it into a barricade between himself and the flame. It jarred the drone, but did not stop it.
“Evie!” he yelled. “Shut down the bartender.”
“Her name is Saskia.”
“The fuck! I don’t care about her name! Help!”
It hummed toward him. Dimitri pushed himself along the smooth bulkhead of the fine ship, blindly, not knowing where he was going, his focus zeroed down to the hissing blue flame that inched toward him. Dimitri tripped, sprawled, righted himself.
The drone loomed and Dimitri grabbed its metal hand about the wrist.
“Help! Guards! Yuri!”
Desperate, on one knee, teeth gritted. The flame hissed, and somewhere, someone screamed. The drone motors whirred, straining, as Dimitri held the robot arm away, his shoulder muscles bulging, straining.
Whoosh.
His silk Fujian Original, soaked in 150-percent overproof rum, caught fire.
Dimitri screamed and lashed out, punching the drone as hard as he could. It tilted forward, wobbling.
He turned and flailed with his burning arm, slamming it against the side of the boat, as though trying to shrug off the silk and smother the flames at the same time.
The fire spread. He spun, desperate, gasping, a flash of gold in the bottom corner of his vision. The Estonian woman was watching from the lower deck, hands over her mouth.
Then a shape loomed nearby—his guard, Yuri, that fat lazy idiot, finally appearing, grappling with the drone.
“Help!” he staggered toward the railing, hand out, to the woman down below. Heat rolled across his back. “Help!”
PAIN.
Pain, like nothing he’d ever experienced, nothing he’d ever known, a rasping scream coming from his throat. Dimitri shut his eyes tight, the agony consuming him, was him, merged with his being, was everywhere and everything. His animal brain roared: water water water.
He lurched to where he hoped the rail would be. Fell. Rose again. Every nerve screaming. Couldn’t hear anything except the roaring, see anything but an orange glow through the eyelids, all happening so fast.
Something solid against his waist. He clambered up, wanting only water cool water. Someone was screaming, screaming high pitched, and distantly Dimitri realized it was his own mouth.
He threw himself over. His body suspended in space for a few agonizing endless moments, and then–
Relief. The water hit him, concussive and enveloping and the pain changed and faded. The cool ocean wrapped him in its darkening caress, tighter and tighter, down and down and down.
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T.R Napper: I start with an epigraph, which for me sums up one of the key themes of the novella: the need for god. Secular or religious, most, deep down, want a master. Many techbros, I’ve noticed, treat AI with a kind of religious fervour. The uploaded consciousness as eternal life, the singularity as the second coming of Christ, the post-scarcity era created by AI a heaven on earth.
As to the billionaire Russian arms dealer. I explain nothing. I just show you who he is, and then have him killed. Why? I don’t say. I don’t say in the next section, when we meet our protagonist, nor in the section after that, where we see the death of another billionaire. The reader will be thinking (I hope), what the hell is going on?
Asking this question can be a good thing or a bad thing. It’s a bad thing if the work is unintentionally confusing, or if the plot and motivations make no sense, or if we flip incoherently from character to character with no identifiable purpose. It’s a good thing if the reader asks themselves what the hell is going on, but also knows that something is going on, and that reading on will enable them to discover what it is.
How does the author pull the reader through this uncertainty? Honestly, the uncertainty itself is part of the answer, because the human brain loves puzzles, and doesn’t like leaving a question unanswered.
The second part is the writing. Is it engaging, and more than anything, does it tell the reader they are in a safe pair of hands? The latter – writing well enough that the reader can put aside their hesitations and engage with the narrative – is not quantifiable. You have it or you don’t and if you don’t, the only way to get there is through practice practice practice (and reading – reading widely and voraciously, in order to see how others do it).
The third part is the subject matter. The victims are billionaires, and odious ones at that. For some, there will be a certain cathartic pleasure in seeing the events play out. Now, the novella is more complex than that – it’s not just some blood soaked wish fulfillment (I won’t go into those complexities here as they would spoil the book, and also because we’re not talking about them for the opening), but it’s not a bad hook, hey?
So there you have it. Now there are a dozen other aspects I could discuss here. Scene setting, world-building, character, how I researched flammable booze and what being burned felt like. The nitty gritty of the craft. But what I wanted to show here was an overall approach to starting a story: a steadfast refusal to explain what is going on, and rather, allowing the reader to experience the pleasure of finding out for themselves.
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T. R. Napper is a multi-award-winning author. His honours include the prestigious Australian Aurealis five times. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Grimdark Magazine, and numerous others. Napper received a creative writing doctorate for his thesis: The Dark Century, 1946 – 2046. Noir, Cyberpunk, and Asian Modernity (yes, he is a Doctor of Cyberpunk).
Before turning to writing, T. R. Napper was a diplomat and aid worker, delivering humanitarian programs throughout Southeast Asia for a decade. During this period he was a resident of the Old Quarter in Hanoi for several years, the setting for his acclaimed debut novel, 36 Streets.
These days he has returned to his home country of Australia, where, in addition to his writing, he runs art therapy programs for people with disabilities.
Find out more at nappertime.com.
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Thanks so much to T.R. Napper for contributing this very cool excerpt and commentary. If you’re anything like me, I suspect that has not only given you a sense of what to expect from This Machine Kills Billionaires, but also left you desperate to read the rest of it!
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