First of all, I'm just gonna pretend that Slavic girl didn't get eaten alive in one of the tunnel systems running under the unnamed hellhole of a city pulled from the story. I think that part pissed me off more than anything else, because she was my favorite character. Alas, Vika, you will be remembered. Especially your apt summary of the Stillwell base: "Yr dfnces r trshed. U gys r fckd." (She uses an outdated JZI that doesn't connect to the language center of her brain, so she needs to use a virtual keypad that floats in the corner of her vision.) Coolest teen delinquent ever.

ANYWAY. I'm not going to spoil a lot, even though I know nobody here will ever read it, but the books go in this order:

State of Decay
The Silent Army
Element Zero

They involve mind control, zombies, nuclear missles, gunfights, cyberpunk themes, the Ouroborus (I'm as confused as you are, but it's not for a religious reason), unnamed jungles in Asia, robotics, theoretical rebirth, and free will. Very dark, very scary, very entertaining. Also very well-written, which is a hard thing to come across these days. The trilogy is right up there on my bookshelf next to Ghost Soldiers (a WWII Japanse POW documentary), Fallen Angels (Vietnam book by Walter Dean Myers), Apache (a first-person recounting of a daring rescue and assault operation from the point of view of a British Apache pilot), and In The Company of Heroes (the true story, also first person, of the pilot of that other helicopter you may remember crashing from Black Hawk Down), and anybody who knows even a tiny bit about me should know how fucking good that makes these books.

Anyway, you can find these books at Barnes & Noble, or probably on Amazon. I dunno. They're softcover, have pretty snappy artwork (for the covers, anyway--the actual descriptions of things in the book are so vivid you could probably paint a friggin' mural based off of the Revivor and JZI descriptions alone), and JESUS FUCK CHRIST do they leave an impression. I promise, you will never think the same way about dreams (or pathogens) again after you've seen the effects of the Vaggot Deformation. Creepy stuff. Regardless of what you walk away from this with, I can tell you right now that you'll find it hard (in the good, suspensful way) to keep track of who really is fighting for the right cause and who's totally deranged.


Anyway (again), I'm gonna try and make this setting and its characters (particularly Calliope Flax, Nico Wachalowski, Faye Dasalia and Samuel Fawkes, as well as Vika because I fucking love her and she's more awesome than everybody else combined my next series of art projects. I can't wait to try and draw the JZI's with their soft orange (or green) light reflecting from inside the persons' eyes and tiny displays just barely visible inside the retinas.