Book Hunter

"On the fourth day of the power outage, with once-civilized people fighting over food, water and guns, I went looking for books."

Zack Vella is a technology-obsessed bioengineer working for Titan, the robotics and artificial intelligence facility in the vertical metropolis of Brulle. Zack is also a 'borg', one of the first to undergo Titan's cyborging procedure of voluntary limb replacement. Having both his legs enhanced, Zack becomes heavily reliant on Titan's bio-blood that fuels his advanced prosthetics.

Eager to break free of Titan’s monopoly on bio-blood, Zack and his co-worker, Nate, set up a rudimentary lab at Nate’s apartment. Free from the dependancy on Titan, Zack becomes careless, letting his bio-blood supply run low, when the power goes out across the city, and Nate goes missing.

Over several days, the city’s infrastructure is attacked, and the citizens fall into panic, blaming Titan and it’s 'borgs'. The outage reveals Brulle’s deeper reliance on power – all information is stored digitally, and now rendered inaccessible.

Unable to regain access to Titan, and without Nate to fix the lab’s broken generator, Zack runs dangerously low on bio-blood, forcing him to hatch a desperate plan to find the information he needs to fix the generator.

Accompanied by an unexpected companion, Zack wanders into the heart of all that it means to be—and to not be—human.

Book Hunter is a science fiction short story.