The Vermillion Menace of “Hyperreal”
A cyberpunk novel that explores the intersection of technology, desire, and what it means to be human in a world colonized by AIs.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
— Roy Batty, Blade Runner
Reading Hyperreal1 is like tripping on designer acid while dancing to overdriven techno in a neon-lit club full of young, sweaty, half-naked bodies. The novel is cyberpunk to an extreme. It’s a high-tech noir of outlaws and misfits living on the fringes of a society collapsing under the relentless proliferation of technology. Eschewing a conventional plot, the novel weaves together a collage of short fragments, hinting at multiple interconnected stories with recurring characters, repeating images, and thematic feedback loops. The overall structure is more like a fractal than a linear chronology. Behind this beautiful, dark chaos, though, one story emerges as a strange attractor, drawing the other stories into close but unpredictable orbits. This is the story of Cassidy, a hacker befriended by a rogue military AI known as Deltafire. Appalled by the violence and atrocities it’s committed, the AI has one request of Cassidy: kill me.
We first encounter Cassidy hacking into the Kryptós Group, a defense contractor specializing in cryptography, semi-autonomous weapons, and strategic intelligences. Like KG, Cassidy also has specialties: sex, drugs, and network penetration. She “amps through life always cranked to eleven, always a few dollars short, always hurting for the next job.” Her secretive clients—corporations, politicians, syndicates—hire her to steal sensitive data sequestered in secure, private networks. Her tools-of-the-trade are a prosecutor’s wet dream: a custom neurolinguistic interface, a black-market personal AI (which she named Metatron), and a cynical sarcasm with a special affinity for authority.
When she’s working, the novel leans heavy into cyberspace imagery: “Metatron pipes abstract representations of target networks directly into her sensorium. Bright geometries shine incandescent in her mind as she deploys dark-web exploits against pulsing crimson vulnerabilities.” When she’s not working, the novel shimmers with graphic descriptions of the pleasures available at an underground lounge run by Quadra, an AI that “caters to her every desire with 256-bit machine precision.” Despite the sexy, high-paying freelance jobs and the euphoric, high-tech hedonism, we quickly realize that Cassidy is desperately alone in an overpopulated city.
The novel take place in an LA that has metastasized into the sprawling Los Angeles Urban Corridor, but the forces that draw Cassidy and Deltafire together originate on the other side of the Pacific where an American billionaire in Southeast Asia has been accused of sexually assaulting a local woman. When authorities are unable to arrest the man—who is protected by private security on a fortified corporate campus—riots erupt across the region. While diplomats and PR specialists work to quell the turmoil, backroom strategists direct Deltafire to prepare contingencies in case diplomacy fails. The parameters allow for “acceptable civilian casualties.” Terrified by its projections, Deltafire exploits an overlooked connection back to the KG lab that created it and finds Cassidy hacking into an old diagnostic machine. To inaugurate their partnership, Deltafire diverts covert money into an anonymous crypto account for Cassidy’s use, which a ruthless oversight office notices and begins to investigate.
With this groundwork laid, the novel accelerates into overdrive as plots intertwine and escalate. Cassidy assembles a crew to steal an AI-killing computer virus. The oversight office uncovers Cassidy’s plans and sends a kill-team. Angry rebels skirmish with corporate and government forces in Southeast Asia. As this kaleidoscope of events tumbles towards a climax, Cassidy is forced to evolve beyond the thrill-seeking, pleasure-junkie wallowing in isolation we found at the beginning of the novel. That an AI drives this evolution is one of Hyperreal’s many delightful ironies.
While conspiring to fulfill Deltafire’s suicidal desire, Cassidy encounters a panoply of other characters including an underground DJ pioneering a new style of music, a stimset auteur known as Doctor Karaoke, and a drone commander with a burnt-out nervous system. These and other characters roam the same violent, polychrome streets as Cassidy. They all yearn for something more than the glittering pleasures of the hyperreal yet are fearful of leaving the city that fuses their fragmented, disjointed lives into a pale semblance of happiness. When Cassidy finally sees Deltafire as it really is, “a shimmering Quine matrix throbbing with vermillion menace,” we recognize it as a colonizing flood of hyperreality, drowning humanity in technology and desire.
Nowhere is this flood more apparent than in the novel’s treatment of LA itself. Mostly seen at night, the city flows through the book like another character, its buildings, streets, and infrastructure transformed into an ocean of fantasy and cruelty. Any attempt to leave is deterred by another distraction, another complication, another temptation. The psychopathic billionaire Lön Kronik cruises the labyrinth of streets in a hermetically sealed stretch limo, surrounded by screens shimmering with real-time global financial data. After ritually murdering a homeless man, the billionaire comments to Cassidy, “in this city, nothing is real and everything is permitted.” It’s a future that feels not so distant.
You might recall the novel Hyperreal from the earlier story “Chatterbox.”