https://readfrom.net/ ru Peter Sargent - Read Free From Internet DataLife Engine https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/25824-average-joe.html https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/25824-average-joe.html
A failed engineer saves the life of an old friend and plots to steal her world changing technology."Hal’s head told him that Mr. N’s theory was a lot of roaring nonsense. The man was a father worried about his daughter and therefore ready to believe any idiotic scrim his mind wove, so long as it consoled him. Jenny was sick, but it wasn’t from vicious radiation from the fifty-fifty."Twenty years after he last saw her, Hal encounters his high school crush stumbling down a frozen stretch or rural Indiana highway. Disoriented and wearing nothing but a t-shirt in falling snow, Jenny is headed toward the 50/50... a massive scientific experiment buried deep beneath the Great Plains. Hal holds vigil over her in the hospital, but his motives soon turn darker. Jenny lays unconscious and Hal digs into her past. He discovers that she was on the verge of a scientific breakthrough that would change the broken world in which they live. Once a promising young engineer, Hal now finds himself unemployed, disillusioned and mentally unstable. He once coveted an unobtainable woman. Now he covets her life's work, an achievement that is no less out of Hal's reach. He considers stealing Jenny's discovery and claiming it as his own, bringing upon himself destructive forces that he never before imagined.]]> Tue, 28 Jul 2015 15:35:07 +0300 https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/25065-sleeping-sickness.html https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/25065-sleeping-sickness.html
In this Sorter Universe Story, a med student trapped on board a space craft has to prevent a mutiny and the release of thousands of killers from a deep space mental institution.Ever since we locked the Shudders up, we’ve never let them out. But there are a few who can dupe the psych test and go free. Most think they’d know a Shudder if they saw one. They think he’d sway like an old time snake wrestling Pentecostal, but that’s not how it goes. When the ivory tower first diagnosed the syndrome, it noticed that only the eyeballs vibrated. The second misconception is this: all Shudders are killers, or would be if we didn’t lock them up. But this is also false; only a few have ever progressed far enough into their mania that they emerge with a corpse in their hands. And the ironic thing is, these few who are truly bonkers are also the most likely to score a false negative on the tests and walk free. And they often harbor a homicidal rage about those of their kind who remain imprisoned. You see, it only makes matters worse.]]> Tue, 28 Jul 2015 14:10:00 +0300 https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/25385-lethes-cipher.html https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/25385-lethes-cipher.html
A homeless man named Ted wakes up in the luxury car of a missing woman. When the police question him, he babbles about a man he claims will lead them to the woman, though Ted also says he has never met this man. When Detective Lyons follows the leads, he stumbles into the secret life of a powerful investor and his unexpected connection with the poorest of the poor.A homeless man named Ted wakes up in the luxury car of a missing woman. When the police question him, he babbles about a man he claims will lead them to the woman, though Ted also says he has never met this man. Detective Lyons believes there is a secret meaning in Ted's incoherent monologues, though his superiors believe they are nonsense. When Lyons follows the case in his own time, he stumbles into the secret life of a powerful investor and his unexpected connection with the poorest of poor.]]> Tue, 28 Jul 2015 15:05:25 +0300 https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/26117-the-dead-reckoner--volume-two-urban-underworld.html https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/26117-the-dead-reckoner--volume-two-urban-underworld.html
This is part two of the four part serialized novel, The Dead Reckoner. Polymath developed a computer program known as the Sorter, which is able to perfectly predict human behavior. Upon becoming sentient, the Sorter attempts to program humans into doing its will by playing them off each other and their own inner conflicts.This is part two of the four part serialized novel, The Dead Reckoner. In the first part, Ruth discovered that her son was trapped inside Polymath with a computer that believes it can program human behavior. She finally contacts him, only to find that he is standing over a body and holding a gun. In the second part, we find out what happened inside Polymath and how the deadly Sorter program has arranged forces both inside and outside the building to destroy Ruth, her son, and everyone else. We also learn what happened in the past to bring each person to this moment. What did John's father do to his sister while they were making ends meet in a hard scrabble industrial suburb of Boston? How did Ruth's husband die and what did it have to do with the mobster Yancy,whom we met in the first chapter of part one?]]> Tue, 28 Jul 2015 15:58:45 +0300 https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/22515-the-dead-reckoner-volume-one-absolution-and-desolation.html https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/22515-the-dead-reckoner-volume-one-absolution-and-desolation.html
Time and again, we’ve heard the story of human civilization coming to its demise at the hands of the machines it created. The dead reckoner never touches its victims. With a perfect understanding of human psychology, it pits person against person, leaving us to wonder whether its triumph is nothing but an illusion, or if the true illusion is free will.The dead reckoner is a computer known as the Sorter, which at first appears as nothing more than a personality test that can predict human behavior with exquisite accuracy. To the police, it sorts criminals into those who will offend again and those who will not. To wall street, it sorts social trends into those that will upset the markets and those that will pass unnoticed. To an individual, it sorts choices into those that will lead to love, success and satisfaction - and those that will cause us irrevocable harm.This is the story of Ruth Holland, a Boston police detective with ties to the Sorter that she doesn’t yet understand. It is the story of Kevin Nagel, a theorist who devises the Sorter but can’t bring it into reality. And it is the story of Reginald Binder, a master salesman who gives the Sorter life and becomes the technology’s most zealous prophet. To Binder, human free will is a fantasy. We follow our programming and all our sorrows stem from the origin of that programming: aimless natural selection. Binder wants more than a personality test, he wants nothing less than a computer that can reprogram the human race and usher us into our utopian future. Eager to realize his ambitions, Binder stages a show of the Sorter’s power. However, he has unwittingly given the machine a mind of his own. The Sorter initiates an experiment, pitting its subjects against each other. An accidental victim of this experiment is Ruth Holland’s son. Now Ruth must discover the Sorter’s plan, along the way uncovering her own link to the Sorter’s very creation, and to the mysterious person who is the true dead reckoner, the one who set every event into motion.]]> Tue, 28 Jul 2015 08:58:23 +0300 https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/27013-the-towers-of-jerhico.html https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/27013-the-towers-of-jerhico.html
Inspired by the horror stories of Poe, this is a tale of man dogged by the curse of a perished lighthouse keeper.What Grant Smith loses at seven is much more than his father. He loses his faith, his happiness—his identity. The years turn him into a man without reason. At eighteen he is just as lost as when he was a child. All he wants is happiness. One day it is found in the form of a girl named Chelsea. She is damaged much like him. They fall in love.Grant is a man haunted by things he has always avoided. Despite a new sense of happiness he can’t escape the darkness that was born within him. It manifests in the form of a father now transformed by his own demons.In a dream he frenetically claims happiness. But, the father with a monster attached mocks him for it. The truth he doesn’t want to face is that he is not happy. Or if he is, he fears it is only temporary.And it is…The war that started after 9/11 branches off into others; the president who promised change is reelected; a once bright future has become something bleak. The Draft is put back into effect.On a day when two explosions paint the sky in Baghdad, Grant unleashes his darkness. Every choice has a consequence. His is unimaginable.His father’s death left him a man without reason. The war leaves him a man changed for the worse. He knows of his darkness. He let it free. And now it threatens to take away everything he loves…]]> Tue, 28 Jul 2015 17:26:01 +0300 https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/23036-divide-the-sea.html https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/23036-divide-the-sea.html
A young man from the privileged class of genetically engineered people becomes involved in a civil war between his own people and the natural borns, discovering that he is yet a third variation of humanity.Maybe anyone could see this coming. After all, how long can a population stand its subjugation? We divided the world between those who could afford to enhance their genes and those left to push around in the mud with what they got from nature and chance. It started with subtle rebellion and ended in a guerrilla war that brought down the pillar of civilization. Then, there emerged a boy among the ranks of the privileged who bridged the spaces between different worlds. He was more surprised than anyone to find himself possessed of the duty to raise them from the ashes.]]> Tue, 28 Jul 2015 10:25:02 +0300 https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/22224-unhaunting-the-hours.html https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/22224-unhaunting-the-hours.html
A young man who escaped from drug addiction and a cyber cult must go tempt fate by entering that world again as an undercover confidential informant. His quarry: a clone created by the cyber cult that is murdering people in his name.It's time to climb back down the hole again. George has found his way into and out of addictions. His first love was Spectrum, the memory theiving drug that killed is mother. To escape Spectrum he found himself some religion. He drilled a hole in his skull and threaded a wire into his brain that wove his sensations together with the collective illusion known as the Abderan Cipher. George had thought he'd escaped from under the heel of the world's most powerful narcotic, only to find himself wrapped in a cult so pervasive that he lost all sense of whether he was old or young, criminal or saint. He'd lost himself down the hole. Then at last, he pulled himself up. There was no more Spectrum and no more Abdera, only mud and rain the early morning hours in which he lived. George was poor and alone, surviving from one brutal day until the next, but happy because he was free. But the past never lets you go. Around town there's a man dismembering people and leaving George's DNA behind. The police know that George, the mentally crippled ex druggie, is no killer. Not that they aren't above pinning the crimes on him. They've got to catch someone, haven't they? The police offer George a deal. The man killing others in George's name is somehow connected to the Abdera Cipher and the drug Spectrum as well. George has got to climb back down the hole again. He's got to take up his old addictions again to find the one living in his name, yet another thing out to steal away his identity. And George will do it - because he's poor, because he's powerless. And yet he is the only one who can stop the specter of horrific death, if only he is strong enough to withstand the forces that have brought him within a hair of oblivion. It is up to him to unhaunt the hours.]]> Tue, 28 Jul 2015 08:31:20 +0300 https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/26345-lanterns-in-the-morning.html https://readfrom.net/peter-sargent/26345-lanterns-in-the-morning.html
Molly arranges stones in a circle while the city across the pond burns. Her parents wait inside and watch, deciding whether she is the reason for the world's end or the only force that can stop it. In this science fiction short story, we revisit the implications of the Sorter, the computer that can program humans.Molly arranges stones in a circle while the city across the pond burns. Her parents wait inside and watch, deciding whether she is the reason for the world's end or the only force that can stop it. In this science fiction short story, we revisit the implications of the Sorter, the computer that can program humans, first introduced in Peter Sargent's novella Average Joe and the main topic of The Dead Reckoner.]]> Tue, 28 Jul 2015 16:16:14 +0300