Blind Angels
by Terry Madden
Camber Maypole was human once, an avid climber and chief medical officer aboard the launch crew of the Vera Rubin, a colony ship headed for a distant planet. But the day before launch, she was scrubbed from the mission for “insubordination.” Against her will, her consciousness was digitized and sent through space to a distant moon in a distant star system. Varanasi.
Centuries later, the AI controlled Vera Rubin approaches its destination. Aboard the ship, Seraph Stone, down-on-his-luck farmer, father, and alcoholic, receives a message from a long-dead member of the original crew. He’s told to contact Camber Maypole, who waits for their arrival with thousands of immortal exiles like her, lost in a digital paradise. The message warns of a cabal of digitized minds who threaten the lives of the arriving colonists, if they even make it that far. Starvation, political division, and a cult of extremists threaten to tear the ship apart from the inside. Faced with a choice between his family and humanity, Seraph is determined to save them both, but risks losing it all.
As Maypole turns from her role as doctor to warrior, she begins to understand why she was sent to Varanasi and that there is more to being human than your hardware.
For fans of Altered Carbon and Snow Crash.
About the Author: Terry Madden
Terry Madden’s tenth grade paper on the evolution of Frankenstein’s monster from tragic construct to boogeyman set her on a path to the weird and wonderful. As an award-winning fiction and screenwriter, Terry has worked with a variety of subjects from historical to futuristic. Her portal fantasy adventure Three Wells of the Sea takes readers to the world of Irish legend where souls pay the price for mistakes of previous lives. She has taught chemistry and astronomy and her favorite question for students is … If technology could make you immortal, would you choose it? When not writing, she likes to paint watercolors and traipse through the hills of California where she lives with her husband, two opinionated cats, and two blind miniature horses.
Check out Terry’s website for the latest information and book talk: https://www.terrymaddenwrites.com/