LIFEFLASH
Meet Jon Falvo’s eyes,
and he knows everything about you,
and you have a day to live.
In the future, the scarcest resource is someone else’s attention.
Cameras are everywhere, mounted in the virtual reality gear that everyone wears, and in every room. Life-streaming, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality have remade the world.
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Marty Selena is a cop longing to be a detective, but the cameras and identity-recognition systems leave few unsolved cases. She joins a retro-reality club where members draw cold cases from the past and solve them using the future’s advanced technologies.
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Marty draws one of Jon Falvo’s early vigilante missions. Digging deeper, she discovers that Falvo has killed hundreds and escaped capture. He is a jackpot for Marty, as she hunts him her follower count rockets.
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But Jon’s LIFEFLASH has grown stronger.
Themes of the book
Domestic/Child Abuse
I love superhero stories. I grew up reading them. I love the way that Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel” and “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” make very clear comparisons to Jesus. The scene with Superman floating above the assembled soldiers looks just like my mental image for the day Jesus returns to Earth. These are powerful and good movies and I’m glad for his vision and courage as director.
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If there were really superheroes though, I think we’d all want them to tackle problems closer to our reality. When I see children in public, I watch them. There’s something in me that wants to protect them in the way that Jon Falvo does.
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LIFEFLASH is the kind of superhero story I think we’d want to see fulfilled first, and then of course, there would be plenty of aliens and maniacs to battle once child abuse is defeated.
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The convergence: virtual reality and artificial intelligence
The convergence of Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is coming and it will transform society in ways that make the Internet’s impact pale in comparison.
Throughout recorded history, we’ve dreamt of creating life. Ancient people tried to create golems from clay. Mary Shelley imagined creating a new man from parts of dead ones in FRANKENSTEIN. Pulp magazines introduced us to robots as we imagine them today.
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But matching our physical human design is far off. We’re creation’s marvels, compact, agile, self-healing and our minds are more adaptable than any computer program. We are not easily fooled by artificial creatures.
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What will happen though when VR becomes as pervasive as mobile phones? The fastest product adoptions are those that save time and energy. VR will allow effortless, instantaneous and inexpensive travel. Want to reduce carbon emissions from combustion engines? When VR fully replaces R there will be no patience for traveling between points, no reason to live in expensive centralized locations.
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And there will be no way to tell if the person virtually standing before you is real or a well-designed program.
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The world that I create in LIFEFLASH comes after this convergence.
Tom Deaderick