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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?
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
Canada is forty times the size of the UK with half the population, they told me in high school geography class. I liked that. The sense of space and room to breathe. Perhaps it was fate the contrived to steer me across the ocean. Or chance. Neither makes much sense. Still, I came, I breathed, I wrote. A lot. Marketing stuff mainly, for that's the career that found me. But stories, poems too. A book about creating. Faraway techy worlds with digital overlords over here, some stuff about meditating and unicorns over there.
But really.
I'm Gareth Mitton, writer. Raised in a little village called Shawforth, near a small town called Rochdale, near a fair-sized city called Manchester in England, I moved to Canada in the early 2000s. I've spent most of the intervening years working as a marketing copywriter and creative director, writing my own fiction and non-fiction work mainly at night, by lamplight. I hope you'll sample some of my efforts, take a look at my blog, and follow me on the social medias. I hope you enjoy my work and, if you do, would be kind enough to give me a positive review. Happy reading!