I wrote Digital Life Form in 2010 - 2011 after a walk in the Lake District with my wife. There's a route alongside Lake Windermere that starts at Wray Castle, a Nineteenth Century folly with an interesting history of its own. The path we were on follows the lakeside mainly until you get to Hawkshead pier, a short bunny hop away from Beatrice Potter's home. From there you jump on a boat, or take a foot passenger trip on the car ferry, to Bowness.
The walk isn't any great shakes - about four miles end to end and over mildly undulating paths. Back then there was a muddy field you had to traverse from Wray Castle to the main path but today it has a hardened path linking them. A stout pair of walking shoes or boots is all you need - you don't even need a map!
We've done this walk practically every time we've visited the Lakes - it's a great warm up before we scale Loughrigg or bimble along the Coffin Trail and in our mind is practically flat. Except it isn't - not totally. There's a short stretch where the trail rises for, I guess, about a quarter of a mile. It's one of those stretches where conversation stops and, if you're like me, the mind starts to wander in a reverie.
Prior to hitting that part of the trail we'd been chatting - we'd just bought a Tom Tom sat nav for our trips - this was back in the dark ages when smart phones were in their infancy, voice commands such as we're now used to with Alexa and Siri were rumours on the internet, self driving cars were a pipe dream of some guy called Elon Musk - whatever happened to him?
We were both impressed with the sat nav - I said this was a while ago - and started to speculate how they would evolve. I suggested that the interface was the Achilles Heel - you're driving, concentrating on the road and you have to start typing post codes (zip codes to US readers) so to reprogram one you really need to pull over. I suggested that some kind of voice control would be a natural evolution - as I said above this was way before we started chatting to AI voices to turn the lights on and off .
Then we hit the climb and I fell into my reverie. By the time we hit the top of the hill and started chatting again the idea that became Digital Life Form had taken root in my head. Part of what had occurred to me was the speed of technological evolution - and looking back ten years I can see that up until then it had been fairly sedate compared to what it is now. Some folk have an issue with the concept of evolution and have a belief that an entity just created everything as we see it now. I'm not going to get into a debate on that - each to their own - but I personally don't have an issue with Darwin's theory. But technology evolves at such an incredible rate these days it gave me pause for thought - what if the evolution took place in another time, another place and we're just reaping the benefits now?
The story is pure fiction - in fact it's very tongue in cheek and, if I may be so bold, a darned good yarn. It includes an AI supercar, probably one of the best car chases in written form, a pursuit by special forces utilising a Chinook helicopter, an Apache helicopter with Hellfire missiles and a British government prepared to destroy part of north west Wales to stop an open secret becoming commonplace.
I mention all of this for two reasons. First - I picked up on news reports last week about meteor showers being tracked in the UK with scientists rushing to intercept them. The scientists were urging anyone finding the meteors to not touch them, to bag them carefully. They backed it up with some BS reasons about carbon affecting the meteorites but my version of events - that they are carrying Digital Life Forms obviously has the benefit of plausibility.
Like all my books Digital Life Form is available on Amazon in eBook format and as a paperback. It is also available for reading for free if you are an Amazon Prime or Kindle Unlimited customer. There is one other ethical way to read this for free (I'm aware some dodgy websites are offering this book for free - it would have been nice if they'd asked) and that is via this blog. For the foreseeable I'm going to be serialising Digital Life Form here two or three times a week, starting tomorrow.
Hope you enjoy the read.
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