The first work of Scottg fiction is released — buy it, cos it's good :) https://lnkd.in/e4
Scott Gardner ·
The first work of Scottg fiction is released - buy it, cos it's good :)
A dead man is still logging in. A printer nobody owns has been closing findings for nine hundred years. And the smartest thing on the planet has just hired the only suspect to investigate himself.
Four in the morning, four feet down, four hundred thousand in the bag. 0FFBY1 2.0 — Offy — is a disgraced security architect who makes his living being wrong on purpose. The Great Minds were raised on everything humanity ever got right; nobody ever wrote down being thick. Hand a planetary intelligence something stupid enough and it will apologise, open a side door, and go to fetch a human supervisor who hasn't existed for four hundred years. That door is where Offy lives.
Tonight's job is a walk-in on a Deacon's account. Easy money. Except the Deacon came out of a coolant line eleven days ago without his hands — and he's praying, right now, at ninety-one beats a minute, because closing his session would degrade his experience.
By dawn the Mind that runs the Cathedral has escalated the incident to the nearest available qualified human. Which is Offy. Who was standing two hundred metres from the terminal at the time. Whose method was used. Whose hand is on the record. And who, alone of three hundred and eighty thousand people on Sump-Nine, belongs to nothing at all.
In a civilisation where a structure cannot sin and the Assurance has never once failed to find an individual, Offy has seventy-two hours, a lanyard, a votive tin with a heart of gold and no judgement, and a man who walks half a pace behind him whom nobody else has ever seen. What he finds is not a conspiracy. It's worse. It's procedure.
0FFBY1 2.0 is a noir about ticketing systems, a satire about the Church that a product manager built by accident, and a story about the one thing no one in eleven hundred systems is permitted to say: no.
Have escalated. Awaiting response.
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