DEAD AND BREAKFAST
Dammit, there are some definitions of "Science fiction is becoming reality!" that you DON'T want to see.
...So I'm breaking this oldish work of (screenplay) fiction out as a separate ebook. (And I may yet novelize it, as [apparently / seriously annoyingly] it seems its time has come.)
A pair of tourists from the US fly into to London for business and pleasure... and abruptly find themselves drawn into a battle for the freedom of human souls threatened by a new and terrible kind of slavery. Joy, chafing a little against the current boundaries of her marriage, strikes up an odd friendship with a young man staying in the little B&B that her husband's big company's yearly convention has forced them into. But the oddness of it all gets seriously worse when she discovers that her handsome young friend, along with just about everybody else resident in the tiny hotel, is dead. Her investigation of the locally-cozy weirdness turns horrifically dark when Joy learns that her fellow hotel guests (and many other "unpassed-over" souls) are being stalked and kidnapped by minions of an amoral billionaire who sees them merely as an unexploited resource... one perfect for using to increase his already-obscene wealth. Now Joy has to choose a side. Does she want to go home while knowing she's left human souls to be sucked into eternal bondage? Or will she take a stand, even though doing so may destroy her comfortable life forever?
...So this work of fiction is now up at Ebooks Direct as a standalone. (The Midnight Snack collection, in which it previously appeared, has been withdrawn until I can subtract D&B from it.)
...I still can't believe I wrote this line so long ago. At the time it just seemed like unusually cruel humor. But now, even if only in the current, ugly "meta" sense...? (shudder)
ERICKSON [the local evil billionaire] Why spend billions developing artificial intelligence when the real thing is free? It's been all around us for years, just waiting for someone smart enough to take it. I figured out how.
And since (in some other timeline) this could have been a film, here's its movie poster, for those of you who might have been wondering about what my Fantasy Casting thoughts were while I was working on this. ...I would have gladly lain me down in the middle of Piccadilly Circus and let any number of buses run over me to get this casting to happen.
(sigh) ...Anyway, here's the standalone script! Go get it. :)
