2023 SF novella. Years before the events of Firebreak, the
twelve-year-old cyber-enhanced SecOps 06 and 22 run away from the
Company for the first time…
But what this is about is not the action, though there's some,
but the people - 06 and 22 themselves, and the Director who's running
the project, and someone else who'll turn up later (and is visiting
from another of Kornher-Stace's books). The Director knows where
they've gone to ground, but sending in corporate security to retrieve
them would risk a bloodbath, so she has to come up with some other
means of getting them to come back…
06 and 22 themselves manage to come over both as products of intensive
battle training and as twelve-year-old children; there are things they
know, things they have no idea about, things they can work out. They
have escape-and-evasion training drilled into them, but that was meant
to be used in the context of a corporate-supported covert operation,
not a two-person effort.
There's some foreshadowing, and some of it's heavy-handed ("The
thought that will return to the Director unbidden, eight years down
the line, standing in an elevator with minutes to live, isn't even
really a thought at all."). But at its core this is a "children run
away and have an adventure" story, specifically in the manner of
Warner's The Boxcar Children from 1924, warped to fit into
Kornher-Stace's disposable crapsack future.
I continue to enjoy Kornher-Stace's work.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.