Short Stories/Novellas

Allison Blue is a top-notch (plus hot) Silicon Valley cryptographer – and she is a cryptographer even when she is being a spy, doing highly-paid contract work for a terrifyingly omniscient government agency. She only took the field operative training, and the high-capacity Glock, to amuse herself – and to feel part of something dangerous. But danger proves surprisingly unamusing when first the Israelis, then the Chinese, and finally her own agency, all start asking very insistently that she steal her company's revolutionary quantum encryption technology for them – and her double-life quickly gets much more complex, and much more double-life-threatening, than she ever bargained for. Will the unflappable Mossad agent with the dreamy steel-blue eyes protect her when the shit comes down? Will the mad-dog Chinese operatives with the dual double-barreled pistol grip shotguns disappear her in a hail of buckshot? Will her own government agency ultimately lock her up in a room, and throw away the room? The final result of this dizzying conflict will only be determined in a balls-out, five-way firefight in the server room of a highly-secure office complex in the middle of Silicon Valley. And where Allison will go afterward, should she survive, is yet to be determined… This 10,000-word novella combines all of the best motifs of cyberthriller writer Michael Stephen Fuchs: over-the-top action, blitzingly new technologies, a conflicted motorcycle-riding female protagonist who is handy with both computers and guns, wildly complex action set-pieces – and, finally, a philosophical meditation on what the hell we're supposed to be doing with our lives down here, especially when everything is coming down around our ears.

Silicon Valley, during the dot-com boom. Money falls like the sunshine, cubicle farmers till their high-tech soil, and everyone is drinking the IPO Kool-Aid. What do you when an amusing and hot nineteen-year-old opens your eyes to the secret universe that is right in front of you? How do you walk through the days, seeing what you do for the triviality you know it to be? And what do you tell your lesbian lover about it all - especially after your will-power has slipped and you screwed your intern on your boss's desk? This short story, from the author of the acclaimed cyber-thrillers The Manuscript and Pandora's Sisters , takes the reader on a 5,000-word perambulation through the sublime absurdity that is our numbing, thrilling, high-tech, hyper-sexualized modern existence. Funny, sad, and true, it asks what's real, what has meaning in an empty and Godless (and totally miraculous) cosmos, and what's the truth about our real and implied commitments to other people, especially when things begin to fall apart. Also included in the short story collection, Don't Shoot Me In The Ass, And Other Stories.

Boom-time Silicon Valley. The VC funding flows like wine, cubicle slaves labor through the night, and start-ups grow 100% a month in a race for the Holy Grail of the IPO. Also, overgrown and overpaid high-tech kids compete in the Assassination Game – stalking one another through the dim halls and trendy bistros wielding a terrifying array of toy weaponry (up to and including shoulder-fired Nerf missile launchers). But when things go wrong on the road to riches, and a hostile acquisition looms, some employees – mere hours from vesting in their paid-for-with-blood stock options - decide toy guns just aren't cutting it anymore. This 7,000-word short story, from the author of the acclaimed cyber-thrillers The Manuscript and Pandora's Sisters , takes the reader on a dizzying, horrifying, and hilarious insider tour of the through-the-looking glass world of the dot-com boom. Geeks, big money, and righteous kills predominate. But underneath are more subtle and unsettling issues: the quiet capitulation of solitary young men getting a long way off from their last decent relationship; the meaning we give to work, and to money, and the flight to and from both; and the truth about our real and implied commitments to other people, especially when things begin to fall apart. Also included in the short story collection, Don't Shoot Me In The Ass, And Other Stories .

Federal agent Theron T. Jackson has been working undercover so long he's started forgetting little things – like what his name is, and to bring spare mags. But when he's cordially working on a little drug thing in a deserted hangar with some edgy Hondurans, he finds that when the jig is up… the only thing you can do is start pulling out guns with both hands. This short story, from the author of the acclaimed thrillers The Manuscript and Pandora's Sisters , takes the reader on a 3,000-word thrill ride through the unsettling world of a undercover narcotics agent teetering on the brink. Tension, suspense, betrayal, two-fisted gunplay, and enormous explosions are major themes. But so are more subtle and unsettling issues: the quiet capitulation of a solitary young man getting a long way off from his last decent relationship; the meaning of identity, and the meaning of meaning, in an empty and Godless cosmos; and the truth about our real and implied commitments to other people, especially when things begin to fall apart. Also included in the short story collection, Don't Shoot Me In The Ass, And Other Stories.

Stanford University, the heart of Silicon Valley - at the beginning of the dot-com boom. A young man leads even younger men in developing web sites for one of the world's top medical centers. In their off hours, they stay rooted to their desks, drinking beer, slaughtering one another in the virtual corridors of ultra-violent video games – and dreaming and pondering about… women. When did their difficulties start? Was it six million years ago, when we branched off from our nearest hominid cousins, the chimps? Or maybe the die was actually cast 3.5 billion years ago – with the first prokaryotes squirting around in the Earth soup. This 7000-word short story, from the author of the acclaimed thrillers The Manuscript and Pandora's Sisters, traverses some of his most important and incendiary thematic territory: young and frustrated men, beautiful and conflicted women, and the crossed wires of human sexuality. Also the baffling legacy of evolutionary psychology, the absurdities of high-tech modern existence, and technology itself – and not to mention the strange and lovely people who work making it run for us. Also included in the short story collection, Don't Shoot Me In The Ass, And Other Stories.