Fiction

Girl in the Tower is an 80 000 word science fiction novel following Martha, a disgruntled office worker, as she uncovers the truth about her dystopian world.

There is no art or science in the tower, no freedom of movement or speech. Everyone is sterilised and babies are made to exact genetic specifications every 25 years. From her office

window, Martha can look down upon the icy planes but she knows she can never leave. Martha is a criminal and knows all sorts of things she is not supposed to.

The real aim of those above is to learn how to teleport living brains between parallel worlds. They can teleport everything else by simply rebuilding it on the other side but consciousness remains their biggest problem. They know that it is possible, however, because a similar thing occurs in nature. They routinely scan every possible world for quantum anomalies, living brains made from random assemblies of short-lived particles, and the victims of their experiments are held below the ground.

Most people know nothing of this, they think the worlds they interact with every night are artificial and so when a perfect baby girl inexplicably appears in one they do not know what to make of it. Explained as a glitch in the program, she is raised alone but watched by millions.

It takes 6 years before Martha finds a breach in their security; a wormhole leading to a laboratory inside of another, unsecured, world. Girl in the Tower tells the story of the 5 days following this as she enlists the help of Sam, an equally frustrated worker, and they travel between worlds in an attempt to reveal the truth. In doing so they are forced to confront the dark truth of their own origin and contemplate the real meaning of existence.

The Star Garden follows the chain of consciousness of an unhappy college student as she slips into a strange world:

"Eventually she came upon a fallen tree and as she begun to climb up onto the girth of bark something white flickered at the edge of her line of sight. She looked directly at it and it looked back at her. A blue human eye meshed with the bark, it grew as naturally as the

bud of a branch.

She gasped and jumped up over the tree, it followed her movement, watching her, and, as with the leeches, now that she noticed one suddenly she was aware of them everywhere. There were two or three coloured, lidless and unblinking, eyes on each tree, some horizontal and some vertical, some more bloodshot than others, each following her as she carefully moved across the leafy floor."