Genre: Dystopian novel
Title: Dead Man Blogging
Estimated publication date: 2040
My idea came when I considered the consequence of my decision to set posts on TOA a month in advance. It occurred to me that were I to (hypothetically) get hit by the Green Line tomorrow, a few posts would still go up over the course of the next couple of weeks. It reminded me of those stories about people who send mail to their loved ones after they die (here is a recent example for you, dry-eyed reader).
In my broken future world, however, the concept has taken on a sickening twist. A blogger much like me dies in a tragic self-driving car accident. It is the first automobile fatality in a century. His posthumous writing, set to publish weeks in advance of his death, somewhat ironically warns about the dangers of the technology-first life everyone takes for granted.
At first, the results appear positive. His writing inspires a small movement of people - 'the simplifiers' - to move into the countryside, remove their iEyes (a government-issued device that replaces retinas with supercomputers), and use antiques like the iPhone 24 (the oldest phone still compatible with Tinder, which is now the world's biggest and most important company).
But soon enough, imitators begin to cause trouble. Bored teens take the wheel and establish the copycat 'Neanderthal Living' fad by refusing to charge their iEyes and crashing their cars into tree museums. Bloggers fake their own deaths and publish sensational 'posthumous' prank posts before 'Tom Sawyering' their own funerals (though this reference would be lost on almost everyone, since it has been two decades since a book existed and the long-dry Mississippi River is the world's longest solar panel). Things are out of control until the authorities step in.
The backlash is swift. The government declares removal of the iEye an act of treason and arrests 'the simplifiers'. The leader briefly writes a blog from prison before hanging himself two days ahead of his trial, the first suicide since the release of the iEye. In a series of posthumous blog posts, he claims responsibility for masterminding the original self-driving car accident and describes how he set up a chain reaction of events to ignite interest in his now-doomed movement. The leader is declared The Anomaly, his followers are pardoned, and order is soon restored.
And yet...
Detective Abacus Finch isn't so sure. Something doesn't quite add up to this junior officer in Tinder's Forged Swipe EyeCrime division. He launches his own private investigation and, alongside his solar-powered robot dog, Snout, discovers a dark underworld of criminal masterminds hell-bent on writing every aspect of the future in the most dangerous way possible: by rewriting the past.
In this dark world, Abacus can only count on himself and his Snout. Along the way, he confronts a series of urgent questions. Does the digital world demand we bring together the past and the future into the vanishing point we know as the present? Is it possible to see the truth with an iEye? If Snout is solar powered, how can he survive so long in the dark?
And, most importantly...
Who is really writing these blogs?
Footnotes / imagined complaints
0. Meta...
I had to stop myself here before I wrote the book by accident.
0a. " 'Sentence fragment' is also a sentence fragment..."
The idea of someone forcing a lowly little blogger to write a dystopian novel sounds like the plot of a dystopian novel.
