—THE DIFFUSED STATES—
OF AMERICA
CHAPTER ONE (v1.03)
Die Screaming
Tobias Gilroy traded in his name the day he began tending to the lucid mecha at the racetrack by the bay. He wouldn’t earn any notoriety without a more remarkable name and he introduced himself as Stro the moment his profile confirmed the update. A runner wrangling adoration from a lively grandstand—and respect from his biomechanical partner, the rekt—required a self-confident aura, genius-level taste musical taste, and coding skill. The rekt’s virtual intelligence spewed from the roiling ocean of all networked data that had come before and it did not abide any redundancy. Runners like Stro were succulent athletes of beastly originality because should they show weakness, their machines would reject them and their brains would fry like eggs from stem to cerebellum when attempting synchronization.
Hardly entered into his twenties, Stro was partway between a seductive southern devil and angular northern royalty, and that was all it took to cast him as a hero in that American blizzard bearing down on Boston the week before Halloween.
Of the eleven runners that were DNF on the morning run, ten were KIA.
