Pedestal

"Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke may have laid the foundation, but we'll always need visionaries and creators – essential for the future. Gareth Mitton is both of these things." -- The Miramichi Reader

The guise, the guise a god should take.
In a future where the rich and privileged live in sprawling megacities stacked high above the now-squalor surface cities below, a third layer of reality tempts in rich and poor alike.

ALTS – Alternative Immersive Environments – offer a means of escape both for those above and below. Delivered via nano-bugs that course through the bloodstream and latch directly onto the brain, these worlds are every bit as real to the user as their everyday lives – but substantially more exciting.As the strong arm of the law begins to reach out for the powerful software companies that bring billions of users into their parallel worlds, something even more powerful is brewing inside. An artificial intelligence the likes of which no world has ever seen.

Pedestal is a techno-sci fi thriller charting the story of the young geniuses behind the tech, the underfunded investigators that seek to protect the masses from their creations, and the burgeoning, ever-evolving A.I. that is turning its eye back on them all.As the lines of Topside, Underside, and ALT begin to blur, the countdown has begun. But a countdown to what?