My current work-in-progress and the first in a trilogy: an epic quest with a speculative-fiction twist, featuring a mad scientist, an evil priestess and the mother of all tsunamis.
For the people of Ciudad, the tales of El Monstro del Mar were as familiar as the thrumming of blood in their own veins. Any child who could speak could tell you of the vast, faceless beast who, growing weary of the endless saltiness of its own diet, rose without warning and swallowed the harbour whole. The boats and the huts and the fishermen; their wives and their children and even their dogs, all were sucked to the depths of its watery lair. And then, having acquired a taste for these new flavours, the beast rose again, to devour schools and temples, fields of corn and potatoes, goats and pigs and llamas, squealing and bleating as they disappeared into the dark and churning depths of its great jaws, never to be seen again.
Fifty years from now, a virus sweeps the globe, attacking the frontal lobe of people’s brains. Millions die and those who survive find their capacity for higher order thinking severely reduced. Almost overnight, the capability to use the technology that currently defines our lives is lost, and people gradually return to a pre-industrial way of life.
The only ones to retain their knowledge and understanding of technology are the subjects of an experimental brain-computer-interface known as the ‘nutshell.’ The nutshell endows its users with phenomenal powers including significantly delayed ageing, immense strength, speed and agility, super-sensitive hearing and enhanced vision, photographic memories and low-level telepathy.
A century after the epidemic. two of the test subjects, a scientist named Danior, and a spider monkey known as Chacho, have barely aged and have retained all the powers of the micro-chips that were embedded in their brains. Alone in their knowledge and memories of ‘The Time Before’ they are travelling through a country known as Jil, in what was once South America, towards Tiago, the city of Chacho’s birth and the home of the earliest nutshell experiments.
Wracked by a series of devastating tsunamis, the city of Tiago has fallen under the spell of a high priestess known as La Madre (‘mother’). La Madre practises human sacrifice of the city’s mute children as part of a mysterious ritual to appease ‘the beast of the deep’.
After delivering his mute brother to La Madre, sixteen year old Uardo, a naïve boy from a mountain village, joins a religious order aligned with La Madre, known as The Order. When a tsunami strikes the neighbouring city of Paiso, Uardo and other members of The Order are sent to convert Paiso to La Madre’s Order.
Accidentally separated from his ‘brothers’ Uardo feels abandoned and begins to question the teachings of La Madre. Then, after a chance meeting with Danior and Chacho, Uardo decides to leave the Order, and join forces with Danior and Chacho to save his brother, overthrow La Madre and warn the people of Tiago, before another tsunami strikes.
Containing elements of ‘David and Goliath’ and other archetypal stories, Monkey See is a tale of adventure in which an unlikely hero must find strengths he never knew he possessed in order to save his people.
This is exciting stuff!
Thanks Jane!