Want to become a mesh addict?

A reading from The Immortality Game, by Ted Cross, with some thoughts…

Mesh addiction. It’s no joke. One minute you’re exploring hidden treasures with the Wizard Xiu, having mindblowing sex with Khloe Kardashian or on a date with your long-dead husband: the next you’re a desiccated corpse with a big grin on its face.

So this is a speculative fiction scenario in a thriller format – lots of futuristic concepts like air cars, meshing, digital cloning, nanobots etc spiced up with a fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat plot that keeps you flicking e-reader pages quick as you can. Marcus wakes up from an eight year spell doing his PhD (via a USB in his neck) to find the digital remains of his dead father telling him to go off to Moscow and locate a missing chip (not the potato kind). Meanwhile in Moscow, morgue attendant Zoya has serious mafia problems…

The book’s fun, and thought-provoking. I mean, would you plug into a virtual world if you could and live your life in cyberspace? Most people say no but mean yes – after all, don’t we already do our best to digitise life whenever we can? You’d have a great life, guaranteed, tailored to your every wish – personally, I think I like the ‘surprise’ quality of the Real World, with its capacity to throw you curveballs and set you challenges, but then, you can program your Virtual World to do that too.

And then there’s the ability to download yourself onto a stick and then upload into a conveniently empty body. Be a born-again whatever you like! Are you still you when you’re inside someone else’s shell? If there are two copies of you prancing around, who’s the real You? And who needs a body anyway – haven’t religions been saying for centuries that we’re better off without them? Not to mention the planet, which would probably heave a sigh of relief if the physical population of humans decamped utterly into some kind of brain software storage facility.

So here’s my reading, ably assisted by Gucci the yapping yellow furball whose home I currently occupy (and yes, there is at least one slip-up).