Reconfigure

by Epredator

Overview

Roisin Kincade is a young, talented, full stack techie. Her mind is full of thoughts, ideas, film quotes and analogies. She knows and understands Flow, allowing herself to be in the zone when coding. That takes it out of her. Dropping out of Flow, as she did that night, means inattention. She is not a great fan of command lines, nor of systems admin, at the best of times. Finishing a long coding session she just had to do some minor file system tidying up. We have all done it, typed the wrong thing into the wrong window, deleted the wrong file, messaged the wrong person. This time she typed a Linux command in the wrong place. She missed the terminal window and managed to Tweet the World instead. She expected the public ridicule, the trolls and the bot responses, but she did not expect an automated Direct Message. Neither did she expect to spend the next few days using a game engine to help her talk to a new system. It seemed like she was hacking an old school text adventure game, by invitation, but it was much more! A world of Fractal Iterations, Quantum Computing and strange side effects opened up. It appeared to offer a programming interface to everything around her. Reconfiguring anything in the real world might attract some attention? It might attract attention from parties more interested in controlling the World themselves? She didn't know who they were, she had never heard of them. The corporate cartels have the world pretty much to themselves. They exist above governments and security agencies. She knew they dodged taxes but she didn't know they watched everything everywhere. She didn't know they kept an eye out for such things, such anomalies. A late night Tweet led her to be able to do things for real she had only done in game code and virtual worlds. Now she was alone, off the grid, with no signal. She had a plan, but it might, like those hated command line interfaces, be terminal!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781518772849
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	10/23/2015
Series:	Reconfigure , #1
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Epredator / Ian Hughes is a metaverse evangelist. He has worked in unusual and emerging technologies in both a corporate setting and out in startup land. He specialises in using game technology, such as virtual worlds to help people communicate and understand concepts.
Being a techie, and working across many mediums he has used social media since before it was as social as it is now. Blogging and sharing ideas is a core part of who he is.
Science Fiction is a natural genre and his first book was spawned from using and developing software for virtual environments.
He was resident super geek on a UK TV show called The Cool Stuff Collective for 39 episodes from 2011-2011. He was able to share his enthusiasm for new technology with the next generation, as well as working alongside a monkey, a cave girl and a host of other characters. In the third series he got to relive his own saturday morning childhood TV memories by flinging custard pies at people too.
His epredator handle is common across most games and platforms. It is part of his online persona, but heavily integrated with his real life one. Things may be digital but they are still real.
He used to use just Predator because he was good at instinctively hunting down bugs. However, then the 20th Century Fox movie and characters appeared and it became a much more common name and handle. The Yautja offering an honourable and strong character to identify with too. In the late 90's everything was getting e put on the front of it, ebusiness, ecommerce. So in part a joke he added the e. It stuck.
Epredator became a well known handle through the rise of virtual worlds such as Second Life in 2006-2009. By sharing his ideas with colleagues he became known as a metaverse evangelist. Travelling the world explaining why you don't need to travel the world when you can meet in a virtual world full of expression and fun.
He is not all digital though, he is a Head Instructor in the self defence martial art Choi Kwang Do. His wife and two children (the latter are both now black belts too) all practice the art.

Editorial Reviews

2016-09-28
Epredator (Cont3xt, 2016) tells the story of a young coder who's suddenly able to manipulate reality in this sci-fi novel. Roisin Kincade is a programmer who loves to use her code to manipulate the digital world. She doesn't consider herself a hacker, although she relishes the depictions of hackers in movies and views her work with a significant amount of romanticism. When she accidentally types a Linux command into Twitter instead of into her command-line interface, she expects her tech-savvy Twitter followers to make jokes at her expense. Instead, she receives a message from a mysterious account that seems to be inviting her to hack into a simple text game: "She was hacking, by invitation, but on a public channel. Another memory flowed past of a green screen and the phrase ‘Shall we play a game?' "—a reference to the 1983 movie WarGames. The new game contains a list of objects that are strikingly similar to those in Roisin's own room. It also contains a list of commands, and when she enters one of them to move a virtual "mug" to a new position, she finds that the actual mug in her room has also physically moved. She then dives into the program to see how much she can manipulate reality—a hacker's dream. What she doesn't immediately realize is that there may be other entities watching her actions or that she may have unintentionally wandered into a trap. Epredator relates this tale in the irreverent, enthusiastic language of Roisin's techie subculture—full of coding jargon, pop-culture references, and internet slang—and he manages to explain just enough to make even Luddite readers feel at home. Roisin is a charmingly guileless protagonist, and the overall plot replicates the puzzle-style computer games that are referenced in the text. The story contains just the right combination of paranoia, wonder, and fantasy to make for a fun bit of escapism, and the author even manages to land a satisfying final twist as well. A short but punchy tale of a techie who gets in too deep.

Kirkus Reviews