Speed Notes on Adam Martin's Xenoman

By Adam Martin

Includes Xenoman novel summary, character list, chapter summary, glossary of terms, and black box tunings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adam Martin
• Release date: Mar 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463220337

Adam Martin

Adam Martin is a recovering curmudgeon who has been fructifying his life after years as a world-weary twenty-something. After bouncing from university-to-university and job-to-job, he decided to put all his chips in on his prose writing skills. His writing is inspired by his realization that life is too short and precious to be unhappy for very long.

Book preview

BOOK SUMMARY

Xeno regains consciousness from an unknown past on the shoreline of a dormant volcanic island, made of dream logic within his mind. He turns inland and sees the deserted Tiki Tocki Motel. On the shore is an empty beach chair. In the seat lies a copy of a popular tabloid The National Trashional. Sitting on the armrest in a drink holder is a cold bottle Shoki Pao beer. Xeno is greeted by Drinama, a brain implant who appears to him in the form of a masked female figure, designed to keep Xeno alive after a Black Magic overdose, a lethal designer drug. Drinama attempts to wake Xeno, but instead of waking him in the Food-4-All supermarket, he ends up in one of the Tiki Tocki Motel bungalows. Drinama races by the window, memorizing lines from a manuscript of the conversation she just had with Xeno, like a previous instance of a movie loop. He suspects Drinama is malfunctioning and follows her across the beach, staying out of sight. Drinama drops the script on the beach and walks across the water, then rises into the air and disappears into the clouds, on her way to greet Xeno in a future instance of the loop.

Xeno comes out of hiding and picks up the script to read the contents, but before he can see the pages he wakes to his friend Zoom slapping him to consciousness in the men's room of the Food-4-All supermarket, in the city of Metropa. Zoom helps Xeno to his feet in order to prepare for his RAP (remote asset protection) artist audition, a psychic security guard that spots shoplifters with ESP (extrasensory perception). The two are desperate for nukes (money) to feed their Black Magic habit after the antidepressant Sunlite has been recalled, and Xeno’s previous place of employment, the Shoki Pao club, has mysteriously burned down.

Elsewhere in Metropa, Trianne wakes from a bad trip when a 5-track cartridge, a technology capable of producing virtual realities in the user's mind, malfunctions on her consumer black box, the device that plays the cartridge. Trianne is lodging in a capsule garage motel known as The Pods. On her wrist she sees a tattoo that reads MEM E NO. She has no idea where it came from or what it means. At the ground floor of the lobby, she discovers the charred remains of an anonymous guest in one of the pods and departs before the remote police arrive.

Zoom contacts Trianne and asks if she has any Sunlite, a designer drug invented by Malborg Corporation that mimics natural sunlight. The natural sunlight that shines on Metropa has been blocked from nuclear smog caused by a war no one knows, or cares, much about. However, Sunlite has been recalled for reasons unknown. According to the media, the smog has caused a drought that has withered crops used to produce Sunlite. Citizens stave off depression from lack of natural sunlight with Sunlite knock offs like Black Magic, or get lost in Metropa's dizzying culture of multimedia distractions.

Zoom contacts Trianne to see if she has any Sunlite, hoping the drug will rejuvenate Xeno and help him get the RAP artist gig at Food-4-All. Trianne happens to have a stash of Sunlite pills she stole from Velva, her stepmother. She heads towards Food-4-All, cutting through The Galaxia Mall, eluding a strange bald man wearing a trenchcoat and dark glasses. As Trianne enters Food-4-All, she passes a defunct pill silo, a public booth used to dispense prescription drugs like Sunlite. The hatch door and interior hardware have been torn out and the walls are covered with graffiti, and flyers of the reigning pop diva Hollymonde.

Trianne navigates through the messy aisles of Food-4-All, enters the men’s room, and gives Xeno some Sunlite. Within minutes, he feels revived and checks in with the store manager. The manager is impressed with Xeno's audition tape, depicting Xeno passing a Zener test, where one tests for ESP by guessing the shapes of concealed Zener card symbols, consisting of a hollow circle, a plus sign, three vertical wavy lines, a hollow square, and a hollow five-pointed star. The audition tape is phony, produced by Xeno, in cahoots with Trianne, and Zoom, but it fools the manager. At this point, Xeno does not believe he has ESP, so he stoops to trickery to get a job.

Xeno's RAP artist audition consists of spotting planted shoplifters in the store with ESP, within an allotted time. Unbeknownst to the manager, Zoom has planted hidden Wi-Fi cameras in the market, allowing Zoom to identify the planted shoplifters and tip Xeno off via black box transceiver with a cloaked signal, creating the illusion that Xeno has ESP. With his confidence boosted by Sunlite, Xeno begins his audition on the supermarket floor.

As Trianne is browsing in the Family Planning aisle, a tall woman dressed in black appears. Zoom sneaks up behind Trianne and makes a pass at her, ignoring Xeno’s audition. Trianne sees the woman in black steal a pregnancy test and alerts Zoom, but he persists with his advances. As Trianne wrestles herself away from Zoom, he secretly drops a tube of lipstick into her handbag before she exits the aisle. When Trianne tries to leave Food-4-All, the unpurchased lipstick in her handbag sets off the security alarm and she is detained by security guards. In the commotion, the woman in black escapes with the pregnancy test. Other shoppers openly steal and flee the supermarket. Trianne flees along with them. Xeno abandons the audition and hunts for Zoom in the aisles.

Outside of Food-4-All, Xeno confronts Zoom beneath a freeway overpass, then passes out again. As he loses consciousness he sees what appears to be Zoom going up in flames. Xeno finds himself back on the dream logic island, inside the Tiki Tocki Lounge Bar & Grill. Zoom's apparition appears at the bar and speaks with Xeno, suspecting he is being kept alive by a higher life form. The apparition vanishes and Xeno hears a crash in the kitchen. He investigates the kitchen and finds a puddle of grease and pieces of Drinama’s cracked mask, where she appears to have slipped and fled. He heads towards the kitchen exit to look for Drinama in the parking lot, but will wake again before he can discover anything further. Meanwhile, the bald man who was following Trianne at the mall, pulls up in his car and dumps Zoom's corpse in the trunk. He injects Xeno with a healing dose of liquid Sunlite. The man, known as Number Three, is instructed by his handler, Garry, to send Xeno home.

Xeno wakes in a cab, driven by Redge, a street hustler who used to know Lew, the owner of the Shoki Pao. Redge used to chauffeur Lew around and shoot his pole dancer audition tapes, He knew Hollymonde when she was just Holly the pole dancer, and he recalls a girlfriend Lew once had that was too perfect to be human, implying that she was synthetic. Redge drops Xeno off at The Ultramango senior condominiums, where Xeno is house sitting the penthouse of Blouse Demise, an old washed up female celebrity away on sabbatical. Exhausted, Xeno goes inside Blouse's penthouse and falls asleep on the living room sofa.

Xeno wakes in the penthouse and goes to the bar to pour a drink. He finds a stack of letters with one on top from his parents, saying they are coming to visit him in Metropa. He also has a tattoo on his wrist that reads RE M T A N. He doesn't know what it means or where it came from. He waters the Wonder Vase, a vase that wonders out loud about random topics. Xeno silences the vase by pouring water into the mouth.

Andrea, the city telepane announcer, greets Xeno at the bar. She always appears in the form of luscious lips painted with red lipstick. Without explanation, she has formed a two-way interactive crush on Xeno. To everyone else in Metropa, she is nothing more than a one-way programmed announcer. She taunts Xeno about his graying hair, inquires about Blouse's prolonged absence, and angers him when she probes about his failed RAP artist audition.

Holly interrupts the two with a video conference call on the living room telepane and invites Xeno to her concert at The Whispers club, performing under the moniker Hollymonde. She also has Sunlite to spare. Xeno declines the invitation and retires to the dining room where he, Zoom, and Trianne shot the fake audition tape of Xeno's Zener card reading. The trick: Zoom picked a card and held the shape towards the camera lens, Trianne signaled to Xeno what the shape was while standing behind the camera, and Xeno pretended to guess the shape with ESP.

Xeno tries to relax by playing a 5-track in his black box, but Blouse's apparition appears in the corridor and tells Xeno that she is going to be deleted, then vanishes. Sleepless in the penthouse, Xeno contacts Trianne at The Pods and mentions that Holly has Sunlite. She can't sleep either and agrees to meet Xeno at a landmark known as the Lady of Metropa.

On her way to meet Xeno, Trianne walks down Avatar Avenue and is accosted by Fayke Tan, a Kick City video game avatar who exists on the video side of the telepane screens. Long ago, they had a one night interactive stand, and Fayke tries to woo her into living with him on the video side of the telepanes. She doesn't trust Fayke and ditches him in the crowd on the street.

Trianne meets Xeno at the Lady of Metropa and the two continue down Top 10 Avenue where they see Holly's videos playing, noticing that she has gained weight. Trianne says she sleeps at The Pods because Velva, her stepmother and CEO of the mascara corporation Boutique, kicked her out of her corporate penthouse. Velva accused Trianne of burning down the Shoki Pao, disrupting her drug connections. She further angered Velva by refusing to model for Boutique and wear Insto-Plas, a DIY (do it yourself ) plastic surgery cream taken off the market after the product disfigured consumers’ faces. Blouse appears on a telepane, drunkenly protesting the use of Insto-Plas during a self-help telethon, but it's an old public access video that was taped long ago. Xeno and Trianne suspect it is a city server malfunction.

Xeno and Trianne arrive at The Whispers, a club converted from an old brownstone factory. The two are comped by Holly and treated to box seats, made of elevated steel storage containers. Something catches fire in the seats next to Xeno and Trianne and Xeno goes to investigate, but a bouncer prevents Xeno from seeing what is burning, while other bouncers put out the fire. From the stage, Holly sings her title 5-track Energy Vampire in multiple octaves with synthetic vocal chords, telepathically linking the minds of the crowd with the virtual reality that goes with the track, via black boxes.

Ramen, Holly's synthetic girlfriend, performs in duet with Holly and her voice cracks. The crowd is knocked out of their trance and Holly and Ramen are booed offstage, bringing the concert to an abrupt ending. Faris, a bouncer, escorts Xeno and Trianne backstage to Holly's dressing room. They overhear Holly and Ramen arguing about the concert in a strange synthetic language and Ramen exits the dressing room in tears. Holly invites Xeno and Trianne into her dressing room to celebrate with champagne, then takes them for a ride in her pleasure dome.

Once airborne in the pleasure dome, a storm approaches and lightning strikes the aircraft, shorting out the cabin lights. Xeno receives a message from Zoom on his black box, thinking Zoom is still alive, until he realizes it’s just an old prank message he never deleted. The storm passes and the three take Sunlite, using a multi-merge black box to enter a group virtual reality of Holly's Energy Vampire 5-track album. Once inside the virtual reality, Xeno finds himself in a cemetery with Trianne, while Holly's voice emcees from the sky, announcing games and prizes that lie within a virtual haunted mansion set to her music.

The virtual reality malfunctions and Xeno finds himself back in the Tiki Tocki bungalow on the dream logic island, looking out the window. He sees Drinama run past the window again, rehearsing the same lines from a manuscript of their first conversation at the beginning of the story. This time, Trianne emerges from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel after using the shower. She warns Xeno that Drinama's code has bugs and tells him to read an old red schoolbook. The scene jump cuts to the shoreline and Xeno sees Drinama setting up the beach chair with The National Trashional tabloid and the bottle of Shoki Pao beer, taking Xeno even farther back in the loop, before he met Drinama. With his consciousness so out of whack, he suspects that the pleasure dome has crashed and this is nothing more than the last few moments of consciousness.

From her observation deck, Velva seizes the pleasure dome by remote control and lands the aircraft inside Boutique. While Trianne and Holly remain passed out inside the aircraft, she orders Faris to extract Xeno and take him to the board room. When Xeno wakes, Velva interrogates him, and Xeno denies that he and Trianne are having a romance, and that Trianne burned down the Shoki Pao to spite her. Velva reveals that she built a lab for Lew to continue making Black Magic during the Sunlite shortage, but Lew has deserted her.

Xeno confesses he has no chemistry skills and Velva escorts Xeno to her private suite on the same floor. She removes her makeup, revealing the damage Insto-Plas has done to her face. She disrobes and invites Xeno to sleep with her. He declines and Velva summons Mia, a young female page, to escort him out. Mia gives Xeno some Klownburger gift cards and hopes to see him at the Synthetic Escort Exhibition in the gaming city of Arcade. Trianne appears in the lobby without Holly. Starving, the two head towards the nearest Klownburger to get something to eat.

On their way to Klownburger, Fayke Tan appears on the outdoor telepanes of a local strip mall searching for Trianne. Xeno and Trianne sneak around to the back of the mall and are accosted by a headless synthetic human, still able to walk. The headless synth gropes Trianne and Xeno fends it off. Trianne grows faint and Xeno sees smoke rise from Trianne's hair, but says nothing. The two continue through a park filled with defunct pill silos that once dispensed Sunlite. Fayke deserts the Kick City start menu and stalks Trianne from the telepanes. He reaches his colossal animated hand out of the screen and tries to grab Trianne. Xeno defends Trianne and swings at Fayke's hand, touching the animated surface. Fayke now becomes infatuated with Xeno. Trianne explains too late that Fayke becomes infatuated with any human he touches.

A mob of kids pelt Fayke's image on