CODIE: A Spiral Frontier Novelette
Excited to share a little bit about what I’ve been working on lately! Specifically, a novelette (and learning to spell the word novelette) inspired by a frame from my favorite artist, John Gaertner. Here’s the pitch:
I killed my best friend. This is all my fault.
The words echo through Codie’s sensors, yet without any short-term memory, he’s unable to figure out why. Stumbling through a sudden warzone, Codie meets Jackal, the famed leader of planetary security for New Lagos Prime, and finds himself faced with the sudden realization that the collapse of modern society may have come at the hands of…him.
John was basically messing around with ideas for the book trailer for JACKAL and he came up with this shot. An innocent-looking bot holding their own dang arm, staring at both a river that should be much more full and their own distorted shadow. To be clear, this does not happen in JACKAL, or any of the books I have half-done in this series. This was a spontaneous ideation based on a horrible sketch I sent him of a robot looking generically sad.
The moment I saw this shot though, most of the story popped into my head and I had to write it, or I wouldn’t be able to shake the idea. This has happened a few times in my long-form writing career (never in games, oddly), where a full manuscript just sort of popped into existence. All of the hooks, the twists, a few missing chunks, but yeah, there it was.
Something about the layers of looking at oneself and your flaws, while both seeing and completely ignoring all of the insanity going on around you appealed to some part of me. Maybe it was the part of me that’s just gone through a pandemic, two wannabe-despotic presidencies, and is currently in the time-honored, soul-crushing, endlessly defeating process of agent and publisher pitching. Maybe it’s just something universally human and presenting it through the eyes of a robot makes it more accessible. Maybe it’s just a cool picture.
Whatever the motivation, the book itself is more autobiographical than the others I’ve written in this universe. Probably because I’m closer to a software development construct than some sort of super soldier, even though I can’t code my way out of a 101-level college class (trust me, I tried). Probably because sometimes these it feels like we’re all just sort of staring at our own shadow, wondering who pulled our metaphorical arm off.
Anyway, I’m excited to get it out to the world soon, along with more stories about Codie as interstitial novelettes between novella releases. I hope you’ll enjoy it and I plan to release it for free as the first contact for this universe. Stay tuned!