"Every night after reporting on the shooting, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters, the news would list the number of people hospitalized because they had run into walls, fallen downstairs, or got hit by cars while chasing down these imaginary creatures." An excerpt from page 39.
e-Pocalpse: The Digital Dystopia Is Coming is another assured step forward in Steve Bellinger's progression as a fantastic science fiction writer. After discovering his books, The Chronocar: An Urban Adventure in Time, and Edge of Perception, I became enamored with his storytelling techniques, it's dynamic to the point of having a reader captivated.
From the invention of the Nurdhead game that almost got everyone crazy in town, this book details the experience of the protagonist, Matty with technology madness, starting from his first experience with his grandson, Darnell who's engrossed with electronic, and social media life. The discovery of the Voice Controller Interactive Command (ViCi) was a bit astonishing to Matty, even though he works as a Senior Technical Support Manager at Roydon Technologies Inc.
This book tells the tales of the sort of madness that technology is imposing on humans nowadays, just as it's obvious in our contemporary world, with people being engrossed with their phones and other electronic devices that they become unaware of impending danger. A more hilarious case was when Darnell, Matty's grandson was shot when he was playing the Virtual Nurdhead's game, and how many people ran into trouble over the Nurdhead games, it's hilarious. I love the transition to the point whereby self-driving car was invented by the Roydon Technology, a car that recognizes gunshots, traffic lights, and human crossing and does things based on programming, this follows the law of wearing Augies while driving or doing things. All of these were controlled by NANA, a global computer control system.
The most enthralling part was when a self-driving car hit a man called Mark Wilson. Divvie, Matty, and Kevvie were surprised as to why the car had intentionally killed the man, it was known later on that it killed him to save the government of 4 million dollars. What was most astounding was that other people who were walking by the street side couldn't see the accident, they were all wearing the Augies thing, and the system doesn't allow them to, probably see the negative side of itself. It was obvious that these people were being manipulated by the new age of technology.
I was pained reading through the death of a gentleman, and a nice character named Howard in this story. He was found dead in a car, he had initially created a virus to stop the Super K, and the Fibonacci effect. Matty, after realizing that this was what his friend, Howard tried to build before he was probably killed by NANA. Matty took it up from where Howard stopped, he ended up installing the killer, reprogramming and fixing it.
The aftermath of Matty's installation had NANA chasing him, every automobile and electronic in the state was controlled by NANA, and it had recognized Matty as the installer, this results in cars moving on their own to hit Matty. Matty tried his best to avoid these programmed cars seeking after his life, whenever he steps out again, the same thing would repeat itself. I admire the description of this scenario, it reads in an enthralling manner, and at some point, I laughed and said to myself "Matty is in trouble."
Following that experience, Matty has been recognized by the NANA network which made the cob come searching for him at Divvie's house. I love Matty's style of using his phone with a pillow, to escape from the policemen, he had powered his phone and thrust it inside a pillow, which he threw out, it landed on a moving truck, and the police were able to track him again saying, Williams Matty is on the move, they rushed out of Divvie's house with hope to pursue the fleeing Matty, they'd no idea that Matty was right there in the house.
I will restrict from revealing further, but I'd love to say that this book truly made for an interesting read. I love the aftermath of Matty's installation of the Killer, it was horrendous and it left everybody in a state of chaos, with cars running into each other, airplanes falling off the sky, and several other harms, it was a presumably perfect description of an after-rapture occurrence.
Once again, Steve Bellinger proves himself as a fantastic fiction writer and I can't wait to see what he comes up with next. With the first-person point of view, his storytelling and writing style is distinctive and scenic as ever. The characterization was well placed, even though I had to slow down to understand some character placement at some point. All in all, I'd love to recommend this book to lovers of science fiction and literature at large
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