The shakes had me bad. They always did when shit was about to get real. I got up from the bed, felt the warmth of the silk-smooth hotel bedspread transition to coolness. The air conditioner droned, struggling against my anxious heat. My clothes—brown button-down shirt, gray slacks, grayer wool socks—clung to my skin. The Koreans handled the humidity so much better. As if I didn’t already feel like a foreigner: my maternal grandfather’s six-foot-tall, thick-chested frame; my father’s black hair, pale brown eyes, and faintly copper-brown skin; my maternal grandmother’s pronounced nose, broken
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Although I had pages of notes going back to the 1990s on the On the Brink setting (Rimes Trilogy, the ERF series, and other works), the start point had always been intended as Jack Rimes's story. A couple reviewers suggested a prequel to delve into some of the background elements. The hardest thing to do was to choose a specific event or events and to make those come to life in an interesting way. I knew that North Korea nuked Seoul before suffering devastating retaliation. We see in "Momentary Stasis" that unification has happened and mutations and radioactive scarring are a thing. And I knew the Intelligence Bureau's predecessor had its dirty little hands in a lot of what happened.
Enter Stefan Mendoza. He's the classic anti-hero, used and abused by a system he scorned. I wanted a cyberpunk-meets-Cold-War-spy feel because of all the things going on in Stefan's story. What is that story? At the core, it's the birth of the metacorporations that become so central to the future destruction in the setting.
