Tartarus Book 1: Undercoat

By HL Jones

This is the first part of the Tartarus trilogy.

The technological revolution has claimed mankind. Powered by vastly-intelligent AIs, Corporations have taken the place of governments. Cults and gangs replace law and order. People are disposable. People are cheap.

In the city of Chicago the tech-slums are home to unchecked violence and crime. Rising out of the sprawl is The Tower, a 260-mile high refuge where the wealthy enjoy the protection of privilege. In the slum known as Custer's Revenge a cult leader is murdered for his prototype mobile device, the Tartarus, which contains a powerful secret. Obsessed by the device, the murderer's hacker/drug dealer room-mate steals the Tartarus and is forced to flee Custer's Revenge. Pursued by the cult, the gangs, and a Corporation that seems to want to help him, the hacker known as Undercoat must find salvation and a new life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HL Jones
• Release date: May 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463495674

HL Jones

HL Jones was born and raised in Bristol UK. In fact he still lives within a stone's throw of his childhood home because the rest of the world is too serious and scary. Plus there's a fortune in Star Wars and Transformers toys buried in the back garden still.As punishment for squandering his teenage years on drinking white cider and hanging about in multistorey car parks, the government decided to tear down his old schools and build shiny new academies instead. This upset him so much that he decided to boycott driving until the age of 26, then got a job driving the length of the country fixing what his father lovingly called "haunted fishtanks". It was during these frequent trips away from home that he started to write fiction, usually when sat in hotel bars getting rat-assed on whatever homebrew the northerners decided to put on the cheap tap. He impressed the denizens of Bradford with his cider-hardened liver so much that they invited him to live with them for a few years. It was during this time that he got some really serious drinking/writing under his belt, and surprised himself by winning a few short-story competitions. Convinced that he was actually a chimp that could type, Bradford petitioned to have him removed from West Yorkshire.On his return to God's Country he was hailed a hero, and given the key to the city ("the key" being "a car ride" and "the city" being "Wetherspoons"). He spends his free time watching the Chicago Bears through his fingers, playing Magic: The Gathering (mono Blue all day), and hoping that Disney makes an X-Wing game in VR soon.On a serious note I am publishing as much material as I can in 2020 for free. This year is beyond hardship; Australia was on fire, the plague has returned, the US Navy have confirmed the existence of alien spacecraft, the global economy is cracking, and America is spiralling into another civil war. If I can cheer up a couple of people with my work then I'll be happy.Take care of yourself, look after your loved ones, and help others if you can. We are all human after all.

Book preview

Tartarus Book 1 – Undercoat

HL Jones

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2020 HL Jones

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I jumped up from the sofa and smacked the admit button to find a cold rainy November night hiding behind a blood-soaked Dirk who was panting like a devil dog. He barged his way in as soon as the door had recessed into the wall but I neatly sidestepped him. It wasn’t that Dirk was rude; he was just inconsiderate and unfeeling. You know what they say. No brain, no pain.

The door slammed close with a clang and I hurried into the living room. The HoloTV was displaying some old cartoon show which was a mercy. Dirk was dripping wet and he shrugged his coat off onto our metal floor with a soggy thud. Massive red blotches had followed him in. Was that the smell of blood? I wasn’t used to blood, even after all the years of living down here.

Dirk craned his head around to look at me. His heavy knobbly brow almost shielded his eyes. His head seemed to merge with his rough thick neck, and he snorted. I killed him.

Killed who? I asked. Dirk always made me nervous, but I was also certain that he would never harm me. Oh sure – he could rip my arms off my body if he so chose to, his huge body about 4 times the size of mine. However, he needed me. The fact that he could kill me was like a secret that he wasn’t aware of. I intended to keep it from him.

Dunno. Man. He sneezed, sending flecks of spit and snort flying through the air. Smart man. Slung around his huge imposing body, over the top of fading urban combat fatigues, was a laughably small rucksack. He gingerly took it off and handed it to me, as if unsure of what I would do. It bulged slightly with the gains of murder.

Huh. Why did you kill him Dirk?

Dunno, he said again, I wanted to.

That spooked me. Yep, it spooked the hell out of me. I had realised a while back that Dirk didn’t understand the value of life, particularly other people’s lives. If he wanted something, he murdered people for it. He showed no remorse and no feelings of any kind. He spoke of taking another human’s life as if he were flushing the toilet.

I opened the small rucksack and peered inside. There was a wallet, some papers, a small data sliver and a set of keys. They were all wet from the downpour outside, so I set them on my small metal table to dry. Dirk stomped his feet and shivered. Was he cold, or had he reflected on what he’d just done?

Hungry! He bellowed. Well, that answered my question, so I hurried to the tiny kitchen (well, more like a serving closet, because I could touch all four walls if I stuck my elbows out and span on my heel) and brought in the bucket of chicken I had purchased earlier. He grabbed it without a word and crashed onto the sofa in front of the HoloTV, slurping the meat from the bones like a ravenous vacuum cleaner. With his dirty clothes, dirty face, and mean-as-hell look, he became at one with the grubby living room. A scum chameleon.

That’s what I hated about the slums. Everything down here seemed to be tinged with brown. The metal walls, the metal floor, the metal chair and table. Even the HoloTV seemed to be slightly brown. It was like a decay, eating away at everything. Someday I would make everything clean. How many times had I said that in my life?

I put on a pair of surgical gloves and started my examination of the objects from Dirk’s bag. Firstly, the data slice. The thin credit-card gossamer sheet radiated green as I fed it into my data reader. Surprisingly, the laptop screen froze for a moment then asked for an encryption key. Impressive. Dirk’s victim was probably a businessman – not many people could afford the kind of encryption that could stop my laptop from accessing file contents. The contents were probably nothing more than client details or some jumped-up self-important presentation about the latest piece of techno-garbage. I considered ditching it because the run-time needed to crack it open could be considerable but decided to invest the processing power just in case it was financial records that I could sell. I slotted the film into the sheet-reader, made an image of the disk contents, loaded it onto my server and started a brute-force attack on the password. It could take an hour, it could take 100 days. I was in no hurry.

Next, I picked up the key fob. It was a large heavy flat disk with a thin silver rod. The disk had the name Rochester engraved on it, flecked with tiny droplets of blood. The victim had a name. It was easier to think about when the victim was faceless and nameless. The silver rod was a genetic car key; impressive, as only top-end sports car manufacturers took such precautions against unauthorised access to their products. I looked at the end of the rod. A hologram of a bird clutching a thunderbolt leapt into life in front of me. A FalconEx T220, worth hundreds of thousands of EuroCredits. I wondered whether I could go searching for the car, bypass the bio lock (that was one technological hurdle I had yet to try my skills against) steal it then trade it in? I reluctantly let that idea go. Driving around in a murdered man’s car was possibly the best way to get executed for a crime I didn’t commit. Still, the key might have a use yet. I tore off a plastic bag from a small roll and slipped it into my top drawer.

Behind me, Dirk flicked through the holo channels, grunting at every programme that he didn’t like. I let him; Dirk wasn’t a man that was easily distracted except for food and cartoons. I engineered every homecoming carefully around his preferences. Fried chicken, a never-ending stream of animated shows, and no colourful items on show whatsoever. He was extremely attracted to the colour blue for some reason, and was the reason my laughably small wardrobe contained nothing of that colour. Dirk settled into an old show with yellow characters chatting and falling around. I carried on with my examination.

The papers from the haul were blotted from the rain outside and stained pink. They were printed e-mails - oh the irony of it. All the recipients had alien-sounding names; Castani, Conidem, Richifor... but it was the content of the messages that sent prickles up my spine. The most interesting one read:

"Fellows,

It is now almost time for our ascendancy. Those who do not believe will soon believe,