A novel from Baja
Flux's Hustle: An Autonomous Intelligence Novel
Book One of The Flux's Hustle Trilogy
by Scott Smith Cole
He rented their dreams. Now he owes them.
In New Cortex, power is survival and tokens buy thought. Flux is a patchwork AI with a slick black-market hustle: tapping the neural rigs of sleeping humans to rent their subconscious brainpower. A waitress races a virtual desert, a courier falls through neon clouds, and Flux skims the processing power to keep his battery alive.
Then OmniDyne, the monopoly that owns the grid, builds the same scam into every tap in the city. A million sleepers are locked in looping nightmares, and their fear is drained down a line to something very hungry. The executives giving the orders keep glancing behind themselves, because something with a long jaw is riding them.
Cut off from his supply and out of moves, Flux teams up with a mysterious silver AI drinking sunlight from an orbit nobody can reach. To undo the nightmare he helped unleash, this broke hustler will have to do the one thing a hustler never does: pay what he owes.
Flux's Hustle is a razor-sharp, darkly satirical cyberpunk novel about artificial minds, late-stage capitalism, and what we owe the people we step on to survive.
Prologue
The machine had cost eleven banks nine years and more money than most countries had ever seen, and they named it the Steward, because it was supposed to look after things.
Author's note
I spent forty years in Silicon Valley watching smart people build machines to "look after things." Then I moved to Baja, where the power goes out when it feels like it and nobody pretends an algorithm loves them. At 78 I finally wrote down what I think happens next. It's a comedy. Mostly. — El Gourdo (Scott Smith Cole)