5 Stars

By Louise Blackwick

From the bestselling author of the Vivian Amberville® series comes the NEON SCIENCE-FICTION survival story of a mother and her baby facing impossible odds midst a global apocalypse. Set in a mad world overseen by "The Neon God", the deceitful and ubiquitous digital hive-mind A.I. controlling the metropolis of New Vega, five people are made to compete for "Gold Stars" in hope of escaping their impending doom.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Five days before the inevitable end of humanity, five unlikely heroes find themselves on an impossible quest to outlive the apocalypse.

Aurora, Stella, Rolf, Tümay and Sorano must challenge themselves to beat the Neon God's Algorithm in a crumbling, totalitarian, surveillance state complicated by crime, technology and civil unrest. Under the ubiquitous eye of the Neon God, they set out to collect "Gold Stars" – an elusive, difficult to obtain, merit-based currency – and secure a seat on the last shuttle to Luna.

In a desperate attempt to save her baby daughter, Aurora must navigate the Dark and do her utmost to survive the last technological remnants of a dying civilization.

GENRE: neon science-fiction, survival thriller;
SUBJECT: nature and technology, digital totalitarianism, meta-reality, social commentary, the nature of reality;
THEMES: inner and outer self, ideology vs. identity, will to survive, darkness and light, escapism, motherhood, love, sacrifice and redemption;
WORLD: futuristic totalitarian dystopia, global apocalypse, crumbling civilization.

Want to uncover more stories from the mind of Louise Blackwick? Visit her on her website!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Creascriptum
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9789492064172

Louise Blackwick

Louise Blackwick is a next-generation fiction writer, author of science fiction/fantasy novels, surreal short-stories and narrative poems. Blackwick is particularly known as the writer of the international bestseller "Vivian Amberville", which follows the epic adventures of a girl whose imagination can reshape reality. She is also recognized as the creator of a new niche subgenre of science-fiction: NEON SCIENCE-FICTION. "Vivian Amberville - The Weaver of Odds", the first novel in a series of five books was released November 2016 on eBook and March, 2017 on paperback. It sold an estimate of 3.3 million copies worldwide and was popularly acclaimed by a score of metacritics, most of whom have compared her narrative style with C. Paolini, J.K. Rowling and E.R. Eddison. For short fiction, Blackwick main influences were the father of surrealism André Breton, the twisted storyteller Edgar A.Poe and the existentialist Kafka. At times, she unweaves the general conventions of space and of time, bending them at odd angles into a mesmerizing and surreal dream construct. Blackwick primarily considers herself a "fantasy novelist", though the erudite complexity of her work has been appraised to exceed the genre of fantasy. For epic large-scale fiction, Blackwick greatly looks up to the legendary Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Upcoming books from the author include: the humorous science fiction novel "God is a Robot", the sci-fi thriller "29 Seconds" and the much-awaited sequel "Vivian Amberville - The Book of Chaos".

Book preview

Five Stars

Published by Creascriptum, 2021, The Netherlands.

Edited by Richard Kingsley

Text copyright © 2021 by Louise Blackwick. All rights reserved.

Cover designed by Louise Blackwick, copyright © 2021 by Creascriptum.

The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this book are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or physically, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author or publisher.

ISBN: 978-94-92064-17-2

Also by Louise Blackwick_

Reprobates

Vivian Amberville – The Weaver of Odds

Jump into the Abyss!

The Underworld Rhapsody

Foreword_

As author and thinker, I dedicated my entire career to the multidimensionality and transcendence of the written word. When I met Mrs. Blackwick at the beginning of 2020, I knew I had encountered both qualities in her work. As a classically educated Jungian writer with a superb flair for deep philosophical thought, Louise Blackwick forwarded her work with the honed experience and grace two decades of writing had impressed upon her. By the age of 33, the young Dutch author was already an established name internationally, mainly due to the acclaimed success of her first ever fantasy book, Vivian Amberville – The Weaver of Odds and more than established within the surreal and psychedelic fiction community.

But then disaster struck at the end of 2020. Mrs. Blackwick fell gravely ill and was soon diagnosed with a debilitating autoimmune disorder that made multiple attempts on her life. She henceforth began an aggressive treatment comprised of medicine that threatened to lower her immune system, all midst the Covid-19 pandemic, a frightening and grappling period of her life she had classified both as a battle for survival and the darkest night of my soul. Like many of us during the rampant epidemic, Blackwick was thrown headfirst into a battle for her life, during which not only her future, but the future of humanity was brought into question.

It was during this intense period of hopelessness and survival that Mrs. Blackwick had come to pen down 5 Stars and I was approached by her publishing team to oversee the editing process. 5 Stars promised to reflect on issues many of us (the author particularly) were struggling at the time: escapism, will to survive, persistence in the face of an austere, bleak future. It was to be written in a new subgenre of science fiction: a subgenre Blackwick herself had dreamt up, inspired not only by the neon aesthetic of its imagery, but the thematic dichotomy between light and darkness that permeated every layer of the story.

And so was Neon Science-Fiction born, a subdivision of the Science-Fiction genre, yet more specifically polished to highlight a digitalization of consciousness coupled with a battle for the soul of mankind, but in a contemporary, technology-centred and ultra-digital context. The neon sci-fi setting was often a Mega City One on the edge of collapse; a collapse unaffected by consumerism and giant corporations (as it can be seen in the Cyberpunk genre) but advanced by digital intelligence (i.e. A.I.) as an extension of the human spirit. To that effect, Blackwick’s Neon Science-Fiction subgenre evolved and developed entirely Post-Cyberpunk.

Both thematically and stylistically, there are at least two types of LIGHT and two types of DARKNESS, both personal and impersonal, both found in juxtaposition with the light of humanity and that of digital advertisements, professed Louise Blackwick when asked to describe what set the Neon Science-Fiction subgenre apart from the rest. This is what, in my opinion, distinguishes the neon sci-fi subgenre from its close relatives. There is the organic light of humanity and there is neon light; there is the deep dark of the mind and there is the shiny dark of a black screen. There is both symbiosis and struggle between the two categories, with one often subverting the other both visually and thematically.

It didn’t come as a surprise that the Dark became not only a symbolic set in her work, but a personified category altogether. The same artistic complexity can be found in antithesis through the digital hive-mind A.I. known as the Neon God. 5 Stars, with its spectacle of dazzling neon lights and its gritty bleak undertones brings to the surface a sense of ancestral meaning and purposeful depth I didn’t think possible to unearth in such a young, albeit brilliant and hugely accomplished author.

It is, thus, without any sense of embellishment that I personally classify the Neon Science-Fiction novel 5 Stars as one of the most powerfully original works of fiction in a decade; a pioneering, high-concept work of science-fiction worthy of giants like Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov and more.

Richard Kingsley

"A mind not to be changed by place or time.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n."

― John Milton, Paradise Lost

Five Days to the Close_

The shard of glass had missed her heart by a hair. She bit her lip hard, trying to stifle the urge to scream out. The bastard who did this could still be around.

A rattling sound pierced the darkness. Aurora released her hand from under her and gave the tiny device on her wrist a soft tap.

Assessment of injury: CRITICAL. Risk of bleeding out: VERY HIGH, she silently read off its minuscule display. Nourishment needed. Risk of starvation: IMMINENT.

Aurora was bleeding. She gingerly fingered the large shard of glass sticking out of her breast. Best leave it in then, she thought anxiously. Cold sweat beaded her white dusty forehead, collecting into her eyebrows. She painfully rolled on her side, trying to gather the required strength to stand up. Droplets of blood trickled out of her wound, dotting the dusty cement with ringlets of dark crimson flowers. Aurora pushed down on her bruised knuckles and returned to her feet.

The room might have been spinning in circles and she would have been none the wiser. For a moment she merely swayed on the spot with her face in her hands, too hungry and exhausted and impossibly weak to continue. She felt like simultaneously laughing out loud and howling in misery. Come on Aurora. Get it together, she angrily thought to herself, craning around and trying to get her bearings.

Whatever used to be in this room was long gone. Giant neon-white datacubes lay in ruin, buried under mountains of bricks and steel pipes. The air was rife with the smell of burnt plastic. Piles of bodies stood grouped together, their faces ashen, their floppy limbs limp and sprawling. The tainted glass wall had partially shattered, spraying glass shards and black cellophane strips all over the rubble-strewn floor.

Why, oh-why had she come to this place? And Star… where the devil was her wee Lucky Star?

Aurora opened her mouth, but no sound left her lips. Her head was splitting with pain and the inside of her mouth was painfully dry. It felt like a dollop of cement dust and plaster had become lodged in her throat.

‘S-Star!’ she finally managed.

The desolate room answered with silence. The only audible sounds were her fast, ragged breathing and the soft whirring of the device on her wrist. "Assessment of injury: CRITICAL. Risk of starvation: IMMINENT."

‘Star, my love?’

The tiny Black Screen on her wrist beeped again. Aurora ignored it. She didn’t need another disheartening health update, or more reminders that the world, as she knew it, would come to its end in five days. No matter how many times her skull took a beating, she doubted she could forget something as fundamental as the Close. She would sooner forget she was human than forget the apocalypse.

‘STAR!’

Her ears were still ringing from the explosion. Why in damnation had she come all this way? For two weeks she had been talking herself into raiding this building – two weeks of ongoing planning, risk assessment and backtracking; two ruddy weeks of following a bread trail of half-arsed clues and guesswork, trying to break into the DIANet Headquarters, New Vega’s epicentre of cyberwarfare – only for the building to blow up right under her.

‘Ruddy kynikois. Terrorists, the lot of them!’ she swore loudly, before turning her gaze to the dark room. The explosion had taken out all the lamps. The only source of light was a half-broken halogen tube that flickered on and off randomly. ‘Star, where are you? STAR!’

From underneath a pile of stacked rubbish bags came a soft gurgle. Green shoots of hope sprouted inside her, burgeoning within her soft, heaving chest. Heart racing, Aurora rushed to the far end of the room and began clawing at the garbage pile, every now and again throwing a trash bag over her shoulder. After a few moments, she pushed a large box of discarded microprocessors aside and extricated a small, fidgeting bundle of rags.

‘Oh, thank the gods!’ she whispered gravely into her chin. ‘Shush now, my love or He’ll hear. He will know. This entire building is crawling with Black Screens.’

The tiny thing between her arms squirmed, raising a stump of an arm to her mother. Aurora sighed.

Good, good, her Star was alive. When they pulled her from her, the little girl was all blue. But here she was today, against all odds, alive and in one piece. Well, more or less in one piece, she gave her baby’s amputated arm a remorseful glance. The fault was hers, all the way. If she hadn’t come this way—oh, her poor baby angel. Her bright Lucky Star. Heaven knows she couldn’t stomach to lose her. Not after she had fought tooth and nail to survive.

A nearby Black Screen unexpectedly switched on. Aurora sat bolt upright, startled by the loud noise. There was an arrested look on her face as she tried to ignore the machinelike voice ensuring from its large speakers:

The Neon God has just credited one Gold Star to chemical engineer Sebastian Marshall for his invention of the serotonin pump. His device promises to help stabilize your mood and fight the debilitating effects of Darkfever—

BOOOOM roared another giant explosion, which made the DIANet building shudder and shake to its very foundations. But Aurora had been quicker this time. Before the violent shockwave could throw her backward again, she protectively launched herself over her baby daughter, shielding her from the blast and pushing her fingers into her ears all the while. A large chunk of masonry collapsed with a deafening thump, scattering more glass shards and rubble as it ripped a gigantic hole in the ceiling.

The baby stirred fretfully right under her, yelling and spluttering and chocking on her own cries. Her tiny flushed cheeks were sprinkled with tears. Aurora was just about to let go of her baby when a loud, long rumble coursed through the destroyed cement floor and made the entire building wobble and sway, as though it were nothing more than a tower of gelatine. The vibration travelled up the exterior wall, where it became a symphony of ominous cracking sounds. Finally, the bangarang culminated with the entire façade of the building sliding off and away, in a sort of liquefied crumble.

Aurora returned Lucky Star to her arms and gazed dejectedly at the collapsed, missing wall. Birds glided across a patch of pink sky; birds of nickel and chrome, whose razor-sharp wings cut through the clouds like the blades of a rotor. One of them, a raven, took a wrong turn and crashed at her feet, showering the cement floor with steel feathers, entrails and assorted machine parts. The raven’s beady eyes – two light-emitting diodes fitted with camera pupils – rolled into the back of its head and switched off. A silvery substance, as reflective as aluminium and at least twice as shiny, was leaking out of its eyes, turning the floor into a smooth, oily mirror.

‘Synths…’ she whispered.

Aurora jumped backwards, as though burnt by a hot iron poker. A single drop of Nanochrome was enough to assimilate five dinosaurs, let alone a skinny, weedy, emaciated young woman. Her prospects might have been bleak, but she wasn’t ready to merge with the Neon God just yet. Her grey, bloodshot eyes automatically travelled to the emergency door. What little remained of the exit had all but disappeared under a fresh pile of rubble. She and the baby were undoubtedly locked in, with no food or water or a possible means to escape.

‘Damnation!’ she swore, stomping her foot in anger. As she did, the floor underneath her trembled precariously and let out another cracking sound. ‘Okay, okay. Definitely won’t do that again, will I?’ she put her foot down with exaggerated care. Her blood-spattered shirt had stuck to her back from all the intense sweating. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. ‘Focus Aurora.’

She gingerly made her way to the recently-collapsed façade. The external wall was missing entirely, giving her a bird-eye view of the city. Aurora gently placed baby Star under a sturdy-looking office table and timidly inched towards the edge of the room.

A sheer drop stretched at her toes, where the partially-missing wall had formed a cleft in the floor. She carefully leaned over the edge of the drop and saw the cracked-glass exterior of the DIANet building softly catching the red light of sundown.

A blanket of dilapidated rooftops unfurled at her feet, each and every one of them laden with large circular holes and surrounded by an obscene number of neon advertisements. Television aerials dotted the sea of glass and concrete, their cables stringing between buildings like a cosmic tentacle-monster, their spindly towers stretching towards a steel, moonless sky. As always, Dark was gathering at the fringe of the city, enclosing the abandoned high-rise buildings with a dense and shadowy fog of war.

Aurora steadied herself against the edge of the building, listening to the soft hum of Aerodynes floating into the stratosphere, watching the ebb and flow of Dark blanketing the neon-lit city below. Even in the apocalypse, the city of New Vega maintained its deleterious charm.

All of a sudden, she sensed the floor underneath her vibrating with pointed, mechanical footsteps. Something was bounding towards her, rapidly climbing up the partially-collapsed building façade; something red-eyed, eight-legged and metallic; something enormous. The ground beneath her feet swayed like the deck of a ship in a tempest. Aurora crooked her neck backwards, trying to take in the impossible sight.

A mechanical spider, so unimaginably large it could fit ten Aerodyne strips round its midriff, was scuttling up the DIANet building supported by eight spindly mechanical legs. Aurora leaned farther in, bowing over the gap, her fingers splayed on the edge of the wall. Whether this infernal machine was another one of His Nanochromed synths, she didn’t know, but it was by far, the largest mechanized animal she had ever laid eyes on.

The mechspider crawled over the missing face in the wall, exposing a rusty underbelly of chrome plates, threaded bolts and double-glass windows. It paused for a moment, watching Aurora through four pairs of neon red eyes. For a few moments, the metallic beast jauntily gambolled around her, as if intrigued by her presence, belching steam and black smoke all the while. It eventually stopped a few floors above her, where it began welding two support beams together, using its own spindly leg as a soldering gun. Aurora looked up in rapt fascination, her ears buzzing with the hot fizz of welding.

A second explosion came from somewhere, nearby. Abandoning its repairs, the mechanical spider rushed towards it at once and quickly fell away, out of sight.

With the giant mechspider out of the way, Aurora edged even closer to the drop and groaned. There was no climbing out of the building that way; not from that height, anyway, and with a very tiny baby abreast.

They were about ten floors up, in a sky-high building under heavy kynikoi attack, a building that could come apart any moment. Its every exit and doorway was blocked by collapsed masonry, its cement floor creaked and cracked underfoot, making each measured step a gamble with death, and now, the collapsed face of the building put Aurora in direct view of the Neon God’s Aerodynes.

‘We’re in a pickle now, aren’t we?’ she groaned.

‘Yeah,’ said a female voice by her side.

Aurora nearly cricked her neck in shock. A young woman had appeared next to her. She was incredibly pretty, despite her dishevelled blond hair and her sharp, bony cheekbones. She was wearing a white lab coat and nametag, both bearing DIANet Corp’s circular logo. It somewhat resembled a surveillance satellite, she reckoned, or perhaps a globe with some sort of eye in its hub.

The female scientist contemplated the neon city before her. ‘B-beautiful, isn’t it? S-sad too. So very s-sad,’ she said forlornly, her small voice atremble. ‘T-t-too bad it’ll all be g-g-gone in five days.’

‘Yes well, we shouldn’t despair just yet,’ said Aurora encouragingly. ‘There’s still the lunar base. And MISRA’s space shuttle, the Exodus, which could still bear—’

But before Aurora could finish her sentence, the woman had stepped off the ledge of the building, her body hitting the pavement below with a sickening splat. In open horripilation, Aurora stepped away from the ledge, her hand clapped over her mouth. Another ill-starred victim of hopelessness.

Still wincing in pain, Aurora bowed down and examined her wounds. A mixture of breastmilk and blood gushed out of her pierced breast – the better breast too. She stooped to the ground, hunched in horror and pain.

Did it have to be Lucky Star’s favourite? The girl ate little enough as it were without having to rely on a dried up old teat.

Her stomach rumbled. No wonder her breastmilk had been thinning of late. She hadn’t eaten in ages. Her hunger was fierce, her thirst even more. But she had to ignore it; curb every thought of food and drink and push on.

Just then, she heard the gentle flapping of wings. Her eyes darted upwards, at the shrivelled up creature surveying the scene. A parrot. And what a specimen too. A chimera split down the middle, half its plumage pink, half sky-blue. Its tail feathers were a little singed from the explosion. Moreover, she could see no sign of Nanochrome anywhere. Aurora trustily extended her arm.

‘Come here, little fella,’ she beseeched. Her stomach gave another sharp pang of hunger.

The parrot gave the collapsed wall a wooden look. ‘Aaack, well-played!’ it squawked, then sidled sideways like a crab and disappeared through a crack in the rubble.

‘Well darn,’ she swore, covering the glass shard in her breast with two fingers. But then her grey eyes rekindled, as she considered the mountain of rubble before her. A bird wouldn’t squeeze through a crack, she thought. Not when it has a patch of clear sky as an option. There must be something worthwhile behind all this rubble.

She was right. The bricks were extremely loose on one side, which she dag out in a hurry, yanking them out like plugs to reveal a forward-slanting passage. Aurora picked up baby Star and folded herself into the narrow passage. Feet-first, she clambered up the rocky passage, slinking and sidling towards the far end of the tunnel, at every junction, careful not to graze Lucky Star or the shard of glass in her breast.

She was soon shunted forward onto a tubular path that seemed to cut through several floors and parts of the building. Aurora didn’t know where the passage led, yet she felt heartened by the steadily-widening walls, and the significantly less cracked, rising ceiling. The air seemed less stuffy too, though it still reeked of burnt plastic.

Feeling more and more encouraged, Aurora continued to walk bent-backed, her footsteps echoing loudly through the cavernous tunnel. And still the ceiling rose higher and higher, as a dull light appeared somewhere ahead. She was now running at a crouch, bent low, her baby gently swinging underarm.

She eventually emerged into a storeroom whose walls were lined with towering shelves holding large boxes. Aurora barely had climbed through the opening, when the passage behind her caved in and sealed shut, prompted in by another loud BANG.

This time around, the explosion felt closer. There were slivers of fine plaster and dust seeping through the wide, ceiling cracks.

Aurora fastened her baby to her chest, dusted off her hands and straightened up. The storeroom wasn’t much of an improvement over the previous room. There were dead bodies everywhere, their faces ashen and lifeless, their crushed limbs floppily sticking out of the collapsed rubble. At least this room didn’t have Black Screens, she thought on a slightly more positive note while she inspected one of the larger boxes left about on the wall-shelf. It was fully stashed to the brim with a single inventory item.

‘Veravisum Visors,’ she puffed in disgust, discarding several pairs of virtual glasses as though they were something vulgar. ‘DIANet must be mass-producing them.’

There was a sudden uproar of sound and the tiny device on her wrist switched back on. Aurora grunted. Even in absence of Black Screens, she couldn’t hope to escape the Neon God’s Broadcast.

Explosions today at the Headquarters of DIANet Corp, after an unidentified group of assailants have launched repeated bomb attacks on the building structure, killing 472 MISRA security details, DIANet scientists and staff. The Neon God suspects Agents of Chaos – a terrorist organization comprising of re-reformed kynikois – are behind this gruesome attack. DLL as well as paramilitary units have already been deployed to—

A bruised hand crept between two pillars of collapsed masonry, forcefully grabbing Aurora’s ankle. She jumped aside, petrified.

‘K-k-kill…me,’ begged the buried man in a weak, dying voice.

Aurora automatically dropped to her knees and began tugging hard at the large, cement beam crushing the man’s ribcage. ‘Shhh, don’t speak. I’m going to dig you out of this mess,’ she promised him, digging her fingernails into the rubble and clawing even harder at the immovable pile of debris. None of the stones budged one inch.

‘N-no. It’s too… too l-late for me,’ protested the man, wheezing loudly. ‘Just k-kill me. It’s… it’s only mercy. P-p-please!’ he begged, pushing a syringe of black fluid into her hand.

Aurora welled up in tears. Her fingernails, which were now bleeding copiously, fumbled absentmindedly with the lethal dose in-between. She had killed people before, mostly in self-defence, but never in cold blood. Nor out of mercy, neither. There was a moment during which she seriously considered the dying man’s request. He’s suffering, she thought, if it were me stuck like that, I wouldn’t want to draw it out either.

Her fist shakenly enclosed around the syringe. Lucky Star gave a soft gurgle.

‘No,’ said Aurora decisively, promptly lowering her