Malware

By Ian M. Dudley

Lately, underappreciated and underpaid PI Marlowe has found more doors than usual closed to him. He has only himself to blame, really. He doesn't exactly have a reputation for good things happening to him or the people around him, and it certainly doesn't help that he's (un)lucky enough to be the star witness against the City's most notorious human criminal. Given the very high risk of ending up collateral damage, neither the reasonably intelligent nor the unreasonably stupid are dim enough to be caught dead standing next to him. As if to reinforce that sentiment, the other high profile witness in the trial, Marlowe's bodyguard, wife, and certified spacewoman (though not necessarily in that order), Nina, has been kidnapped. It's up to Marlowe to rescue her, but if there is one constant he can count on, it's that not everything is as it seems...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ian M. Dudley
• Release date: Mar 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005522919

Ian M. Dudley

Ian M. Dudley was born in California in 19--, in what will undoubtedly go down in the history books as a dark year indeed for literature. At age 18, he ran away to New York City to find fame and glamor in the New York literary world. He didn't.Ian has written numerous unpublished works of fiction and non-fiction, the titles of which are too terrible to duplicate here, except for The Killer Party: How to Host A Murder Mystery. The promotional activities for that book led to his incarceration in 1993 in the New York Municipal Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Book preview

Malware

by

Ian M. Dudley

MALWARE

A Pallmark Publication / October 2020

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2020 Ian M. Dudley

Cover artwork by Chris Harrington (https://shorturl.at/htxST)

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Pirate copies of this book may contain malware.

All characters appearing in this work are fictional, and any similarity to persons real, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and totally unintentional. I pinky swear and double dog dare you to contradict me.

COMPILED ON PLANET EARTH WITH ELECTRONS SOURCED SOMEWHERE ON THE SAME PLANET...PROBABLY

Other Works by Ian M. Dudley

MARLOWE AND THE SPACEWOMAN series

Marlowe and the Spacewoman

The Santa Claus Gang

Balloons of the Apocalypse

Malware (feel free to buy another copy!)

Children's Books (yes, really, sort of)

Kleencut (It's free!)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to acknowledge pens, paper bound into notebooks, and x86 architecture CPUs, without which this story would have languished in my head and never escaped into the outside world. Because of their hard work and perseverance, no proficiency in telepathy is required to enjoy this work.

Any pain the reader experiences in the course of reading this narrative is due in no part to the pens, papers, and x86 CPUs that were drafted, quite without concern for their feelings on the matter, into service creating a physically interactive version of this work. Blame for any such pain falls squarely on my shoulders.

Credit also to the following individuals, whose critiques of early drafts of this work have served only to increase your reading pleasure, or, if you hate it, decrease the amount of discomfort you could have experienced through their thoughtful red lines and notations of No no no!

Scott Brown

Clifford Brooks

Keith White

My sons, who insisted on reading earlier drafts while on long car trips. They didn’t give a whole lot of feedback, per se, but that they finished at all, and without getting car sick, was a source of enormous encouragement.

MALWARE

While elected office holds little power these days, what small

amount it does possess is vociferously fought over.

- Gerald Ford III, Jr.

Marlowe guided the Studebaker off the expressway and into the Trekker District. This earned some angry honks and flash messages from the auto drive vehicles around him that, in a rare act of solidarity, gave unified voice to their disapproval of the almost unheard of instance of a human behind the wheel.

Based on her actions thus far, said House, Marlowe’s home AI, over the comm link, I calculate a high confidence interval that we can trust Interim Chief Minister of Policing MacNamara if we were to reach out to her for assistance.

No,