The Case Of The Missing Q-Drives

By Raymond Towers

Quantum Drives hold the memories and avatars of the formerly living. Only the rich can afford them. When many of the drives go missing, it is up to quirky Detective Varriano to find out the who, what, where, when and why. It won’t be easy, because there certain shady characters don’t want those drives to be found. In fact, most everyone involved with this case is shady! Rating: HIGH controversy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raymond Towers
• Release date: Nov 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005990701

Raymond Towers

Raymond Towers is an author of fantasy, horror and science fiction that strays away from the mainstream, plus a little in the way of true paranormal and other genres. He has written and independently published over forty titles, most of them full-length novels and collections, with several more on the way. The author has been a lifelong resident of warm and sunny southern California, a location that pops up frequently in his writing. At the moment, the author is looking for ways to reach new readers all over the world, in addition to pursuing his great love of writing and taking it to the next level.

Book preview

About the cover: The cover image is titled Abrams Effectd. It was created by Pawel Maryanov and it is being used under a Flickr Creative Commons Attribution License. (CC BY)

About this title: Quantum Drives hold the memories and avatars of the formerly living. Only the rich can afford them. When many of the drives go missing, it is up to quirky Detective Varriano to find out the who, what, where, when and why. It won’t be easy, because there certain shady characters don’t want those drives to be found. In fact, most everyone involved with this case is shady! Rating: HIGH controversy.

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Other e-books by Raymond Towers:

A Terrible Thing To Waste

Demonic Murmurs Collection

Dobrynia’s Path 1

Roaches In The Attic 0 – Non-Retrieval

The Throwback

The Two Sides Of Humburg

Two Bedroom Cottage

Variant Worlds 1 Collection

A Detective Varriano Mystery

The Case Of The Missing Q-Drives

Raymond Towers

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Raymond Towers

Smashwords Edition, License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All of the characters in this e-book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, whether living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This e-book contains a HIGH amount of controversial subject matter.

Table Of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Menoko Boi

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Epilogue

Influences

About The Author

Author Website

Introduction

I know what you’re wondering. How did this story come about? The answer is… a strange one. It started way back in the 1980’s. Yes, that far back! I was a big fan of the X-Men comic books back then. Cut forward to when I was 19 to 20 years old, working in a place with minimal manual labor that gave me a lot of free time to write short stories or ideas for future short stories. The X-Men were mutants born with superhuman powers. Some of their powers were fun, others amazing, still others too ridiculous to consider, like Ice Man making giant ice slides to move around, or Colossus turning into solid metal. Even at that age, I understood that the laws of physics could not become manipulated in such fashions.

I wanted to create a group of mutants who had subtle powers instead, powers they might not even realize were powers until they used them, or practiced using them with each other or on others. I did not want my mutants to acquire their powers exactly the way the X-Men did in Marvel Comics, so I toyed around with other ways to enhance my future characters. Their powers could come from genetic modifications, for example, or from interbreeding with a new species of human from outer space. The powers themselves were within the realm of plausible science, one or two steps from the psychic or telekinetic abilities we speculate about today. I still have a goodly amount of notes from that time; my mutant stories have yet to be written, with a new premise, and perhaps in the sort of near-future cyberpunk setting you will read about here.

I had one mutant character who would be second-generation. That is, he was born from parents who were both mutants, gaining a next-level evolutionary leap from generation one. I won’t tell you what his mutant power was / will be, because that’s a future spoiler. What I will tell you is that the police tasked with hunting this mutant down were quite unprepared for his powers, and his grisly crimes, once the mutant devolves into a serial killer. I needed a new kind of detective for this job, one who could learn to find patterns in the mutant’s clues, predict future acts of violence, and in some way counter the mutant’s special ability that makes him nearly impossible to catch.

And so, Detective Varriano was born, in 1990 or ‘91. From the start, I wanted him to be named Richard Varriano. Where that name came from, I don’t even know, but I did cyberpunk the first name into Rickard instead. Varriano was stocky and tough, but he became bumbling and fumbling while chasing down the elusive serial killer, clearly out of his element but wanting to get the job done no matter what the cost. I set the original story aside for years, because I understood that I was not at that age good enough to write a full length crime novel yet. In the year 2000, I again ended up in a place where I had short amounts of work followed by long amounts of down-time. I revisited my notes, expanded them a little, and had the inclination to give Varriano a quirk. That’s when he became an amateur poet, turning the gruesome details of crime scenes into solemn prose to help him cope with his everyday duties.

If there is any single, primary prototype for Detective Varriano, it is Detective Cameron from the 1986 movie Night Of The Creeps. Who could forget the memorable line ‘thrill me’ whenever the hard-nosed investigator was about to get even more bad news? In my mind’s eye, when I think of Detective Varriano, the first image that pops up is a drawing of Varriano I made, that looks a lot like actor Tom Atkins as he did while starring in that movie.

The Detective Varriano you will see on these pages is a lighter, younger version with a dry sense of humor and a starter’s notion of what poetry is. That was done intentionally. I’m showing Varriano near the beginning of his career, while I flesh out what his world is going to look like, and how he’ll interact with others as time goes on. If and when I get around to writing my mutant novels, and I do have notes for three or four of them, Varriano will have some long years under his belt, and his outlook and prose will become progressively better, but also grimmer.

Many details for the following story were created through cyberpunk idea generators found online, including names, descriptions and story ideas. I collected these details in the hopes that readers will browse through them and become inspired enough to write their own cyberpunk stories. For more info, please visit my site Raymond Towers Dot Com, and have a look at the Freebies / Cyberpunk page.

R Towers

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The Case Of The Missing Q-Drives

1

Stem City, 2046, a place most people didn’t like to live in except most people didn’t have any choice in the matter. They lived there because they had nowhere else to go. There was no other place to go, really, unless someone decided to throw in the towel for good and head into the emptiness of the eastern desert, where all the nomads lived. They were all cannibals, according to the major news media, cannibals and creeps who ate their young or impregnated them to keep their tribes going.

Oh, there was always talk about a walled city out there; it gave the residents hope, but no one had ever been there. No one knew anybody that had gone out there and come back. For all intents and purposes, the walled city did not exist; it was a myth, a fantasy that miserable adults told to their miserable children, when the children were old enough to figure out they were fucked from the day they were born and that’s the way it was going to be.

Ninety-nine percent of the population would stand still if a malfunctioning hover-car was about to land on top of their head, because that’s how ready they were to die, but not Darwin Delucca. He was chairman of Stem Corp, a pharmaceutical company that had made hundreds of billions when there were hundreds of billions to be made, the first company that developed an antidote to the bad Gates Vaccines of the 2020s, which were supposed to produce infertility in people over thirty but ended up causing massive die-offs in the human population of the entire planet Earth. Stem Corp, saviors of humankind, and ninety-nine percent of the people out there didn’t give a shit.

Stem Corp, preparing you for tomorrow!

Delucca lived on the twenty-fifth floor of Stem Corp Tower. Some people, the diehards, still called it Balkonur Tower after the previous owners who’d first erected it. The tower had been built in the early 2030s, right after the War for Silicon Valley, and that war had erupted right after the Big Quake of 2031 that wrecked California and sunk most of its major cities: San Fran, Los Angeles and San Diego, dumped into the Pacific Ocean. Too bad for them, but it was their fault that they’d paved everything and constructed so many high-rise buildings that it put extra stress on all the earthquake faults. What did it matter anyway? All those people who’d died, three-quarters of them were infertile and complaining about life just like the people in Stem City did today.

There were too many saints in California. Even Stem City was once called Santa Barbara, but nobody cared about the saints anymore. Delucca was around when the Department of History decided enough was enough and allowed corporations to bid for the naming rights of cities. That was around the time when Stem City first came about, when the survivors of the Silicon Valley War fled their precious little technocratic haven following years of assassinations and terrorist acts. Nobody really won that war. They couldn’t even rebuild Silicon Valley if they wanted to. There was no money for it, and no interest in reviving social media companies that could strangle the will of nations. Besides, Silicon Valley was underwater now. It was generally acknowledged that when terrorists blew up twenty of the northern dams and flooded the San Joaquin Valley, it signaled the death knell for the techno-socialists. The Dept. of History blamed the anarchists, but that wasn’t the truth. The techno-comrades did it to themselves.

And so, a quarter of a billion dollars later, Santa Barbara became Stem Corp City, except the name didn’t have such a good ring to it, and it was changed to Stem City which flowed off the tongue a lot better. Stem City, with building codes prohibiting developers from going higher than twenty-five floors, to hopefully avoid the weight pressure put on the land. Stem City, where a man like Darwin Delucca could rise up from a minor clerical position in data entry, and end up the second most powerful man on the entire west coast of North America. The only man with more authority than he was the Governor of Regional District Nine, formerly FEMA District Nine, who oversaw relations with the other struggling cities on the coast, while Delucca watched over all of Stem City and its three million inhabitants. Some people were pushing for Delucca to unseat the current Governor, even to assassinate him if he didn’t go quietly, but Delucca did not want the job. He was happy right where he was.

At the moment, Delucca was standing and admiring the view from his floor to ceiling windows. They didn’t show the city; that’s the last thing he wanted to see. Stem City looked like its residents had painted it over in grime and shit. He could thank the liberals for that. They were still handing out needles to all the drug addicts, and letting them set up tent cities all over the fucking place without having the brains to truck in a couple thousand portable shitters.

Instead, Delucca had the holo-projector going, covering up all the filth. The windows displayed an empty Hawaiian beach with soft waves lapping at the shore. Hawaii did not exist anymore, not after the volcanoes blew the chain of islands to hell. What did exist was old archive footage, digitally re-mastered to such an extent that just by watching the video, Delucca felt he could step out into the bright sunshine, and dig his feet into the soft, moist sand.

Delucca wondered what time it was. He wanted to use the cycling machine for a good half hour to an hour, except he didn’t really need to. His body was enhanced with