So I sat down to write an article for my Substack last weekend, and I got caught up in a completely unrelated random thought.
What I meant to do was write down the idea on my notepad for later and get back to the article. But we all know that isn't what happened.

What did happen was a full-on short story project of a completely original idea that took over the next 6 days of my life.
First and Second drafts are down. Tell me hyperfocus isn't a thing...😳

Below, I'll share the synopsis with you all, an excerpt from the story, and a call for anyone interested in being a beta reader and reading the full story.

Unlike my first novel, this one clocks in at around 122 pages with a word count under 17,000. If you are interested in being a beta reader, message me on Discord!

Synopsis:

STANDARD PROCEDURE

Gustavo "Tab" Ruiz survives by staying small. In a city where corporations own the air, the food, and the genetics of every child born inside its walls, being the man nobody notices twice is the only survival strategy worth having.

It stops working the day his augmentation starts failing.

The only repair pathway runs through a missing tech specialist named Marek Vulkan - and the trail to find him is too clean, too deliberate, too perfectly designed for someone exactly like Tab. The deeper he follows it, the more the job stops looking like a job. The corporate powers running what's left of the world are older than their buildings. Their interest in Tab is older than he is.

He was hired to find one man. What he finds instead is the truth about who built the City, who built him, and why the machine was never as impersonal as he needed it to be.

Excerpt:

The Desk called at noon.

"Recovery job." The voice was filtered. It always was. Eleven years and Tab still couldn't say with certainty whether it belonged to a man or a woman or something else entirely. "Priority tier. A technical specialist named Vulkan has dropped off the network. Marek Vulkan, Vulkan Foundry, independent contractor status. Last confirmed location: industrial sub-tier, grid seven. Find him, confirm he's operational, report back."

Tab was sitting in a transit car heading toward Tier 2. He watched the city scroll past the scratched window. "Vulkan Foundry is Tier 1."

"Correct."

"My bracket is Tier 2 and below. You know that."

"The bracket is adjustable." A pause. "Given appropriate compensation."

"Who's asking?"

"Quicksilver is asking. On behalf of a client whose name isn't part of this conversation."

Tab thought about that. A Tier 1 specialist going dark was a corporate matter. Corporations had their own recovery infrastructure, their own people, their own ways of handling it quietly. Quicksilver didn't subcontract this kind of job to a Tier 2 fixer unless the corporate channels were either too visible or too compromised to use. Neither option was comfortable.

"Not interested," he said.

The number The Desk offered next was enough to cover fourteen months of contractor fees.

Tab looked at it for a moment. "I'll call you back."