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Four stories by Michael D. Smith Published December 2021 eBook (126 pages) Amazon (ASIN B09NTVRWCW) Barnes and Noble (BN ID 2940165733376) Smashwords (ISBN 9781005501419) and other online retailers trade paperback (134 pages) Background | Excerpt (“Roadblock” in PDF format) |
Four stories featuring mystical construction strikers, slave employees in Australia, an archeologist exiled to deep space, and a corporation battling mental illness.
Roadblock
A feckless architectural school graduate falls in with a sixteen-year-old’s dubious trucking venture that takes them to the rural south in deep night. There they encounter a massive roadblock, and construction strikers with the power to eradicate all light.
Randy and Laura
Randy lives in the drug-addled delusion that he’s a slave employee at New Fascist Australia Toll Road Number One. Laura, who also works at the urban American gas station generating this fantasy, hopes to save enough cash at the menial job to escape both Randy and her tyrannical father, whom Randy worships as the NFA Gasoline Minister.
Perpetual Starlit Night
Archeologist Sairjin ShiriKor arrives on a tiny artificial gravity platform in deep space to give a scholarly lecture. But the barbarian colonists scoff at her evident delusion that she’s anything but a criminal sent to be incarcerated on the changeless and apparently motionless platform.
Damage Patrol
The Conscious Reach Corporation sets out to cure an entire city’s mental illness, one tormented soul at a time. IT technician Lucy earns a promotion to head the Damage Patrol unit, but her uncanny ability to reach inside the wounded and burn out their traumas leads her to the evil at the root of the corporation.