John Sundman - Acts of the Apostles

Praise for John F.X. Sundmans Acts of theApostles

Winner of the Writers Digest National SelfPublished Book Award

Acts of the Apostles is the fin desiecle techno-thriller novel. It is an incredible read. In it anightmare of nanotechnology and genetic manipulation ofuncomfortable believability unfolds before us, the equal if notbetter of any work by any seasoned big name writer in this genre.As a first novel, its craftsmanship is quite beyond accounting.Author John F. X. Sundman has written a magnificent work ofliterature, and has simultaneously made a bold ethical statementabout the inexorable but blind quest of science, the technologicalhubris that feeds off of it, and freedom of the individual mindthat is threatened by it.

John Jurek, Midwest Book Review

This book is four kinds of good. First, it isa good fictional illustration of the nanotechnology fears that BillJoy was writing about in his famous Wired article, Why the futuredoesnt need us.. Second, and more importantly, it is a goodinternational conspiracy suspense action thriller (not easy to do);Third, it is somewhat of a roman a clef, which provides extraentertainment as you compare its fictional world with the realworld. And fourth, it is a very intelligent satire as well,reminiscent of the Terry Southern of Dr. Strangelove.

The Luddite Reader

A classy IT thriller a page turner...Sundman does not rely solely on his fast paced action and brilliantthrills to engage the reader. He wins the reader of Acts of theApostles with finely developed characters.

Candace Cael Carmen, Blackcat Books

Sundman... creates a well, everything ispossible feeling and made me believe these crazy things while thestory was flowing and the pages were turning. Which are just aboutall you can ask when the ideas are this far out. Or are they? Thecharacters are believable and their normality makes a nice contrastto the weirdness of the story. Ill be looking forward to somethingelse from Sundman and so should you.

TC, SFBook.com

Consistently interesting frighteninglybelievable. The book will have you looking at the world around youin a new light. A thumbs up.

Fantastica Daily, Mervius.com

A satisfying suspense thriller that isdisturbingly thought-provoking. Like [Douglas] Couplands work, itis deeply saturated in the geek world view, and full of enjoyablecultural and pop-cultural allusions. Unlike Couplands work, it isplot-driven.

Jeff Zeldman Presents Daily Report

Acts of the Apostles is a technologythriller filled with little nuggets of technology intermingled witha fast paced plot. From beginning to end, I pored over every detailthat was placed in this book. And when I was done, I re-read it tosee if I had missed anything the first time around. Id classifythis book in the same category as cyberpunk classicsNeuromancer by William Gibson, Snow Crash by NealStephenson, and 1984 by George Orwell.

J.P. Hackworth, NewsTrolls.com

[Sundmans] skills can be compared to earlyTom Clancy. In Hunt for Red October, Clancy surprised us allby making military lingo seem like plain English. Sundman hasequivalent skills when writing about the computer and biologicalsciences.

Mostlyfiction.com

Ive described it to friends as What TomClancy would write if he were smart. The plot devices, thecharacters and topics are all very familiar to the geek audience,and its quite refreshing to read a book that understands themindset its audience will have.

Hemos, Slashdot.org

John Sundman has written a really excitingand fun to read technothriller that has everything youre lookingfor. This book is totally cool on an amazing number of levels...Once you pick this book up, you wont stop til youve read itallthe pages seems as short as a .15 micron process. Too manytechnothrillers use the tech parts as filler; Acts of theApostles uses tech as an integral piece of the books and thecharacters development.

Sam Evans, Geek.com

Sundman obviously gets it, and moreimportantly, he gets it right. The result is an intelligent,credible story of action and intrigue reminiscent of MametsSpanish Prisoner.

Pete St. Onge, BioInformatics.org

Acts of the Apostles may well be theultimate hacker book.

Rusty Foster, Kuro5hin.org

Acts of theApostles

Mind Over Matter VolumeBlue

John F. X.Sundman

Smashwords edition

Copyright 2010 John Sundman

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personalenjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away toother people. If you would like to share this book with anotherperson, please purchase an additional copy for each person youshare it with. If youre reading this book and did not purchase it,or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should returnto Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

This is a work of fiction. All resemblancesto real people and actual events are coincidental.

Cover design by Gary Gray

Music and lyrics to TheAir and El Monte Legion Stadium are from the album Uncle Meat by (Frank Zappa and) The Mothers ofInvention.

Music and lyrics to Poundand Andy Fell are from the album In a Roman Mood by Human Sexual Response.

Music and lyrics to Uh-oh are from thealbum Uh-oh by Rosenshontz.

The description of WilderPenfields work is paraphrased from Gedel,Escher, Bach , by Douglas Hofstadter.

Nick and Caseys hack isbased upon the article Diary of a Hacker Break-in in Client Server magazine.

The phrase cigarette paperupon which the bumblebees have urinated is taken from the marvelous poem Taking a walk with you by KennethKoch.

The character Monty Meekmanspeaks one sentence that was cribbed verbatim from A Bend in theRiver, by V.S. Naipaul.

Citations from the work ofAbraham Maslow, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Vannevar Bush are as appear in the text.

Dedication

for Betty Burton, of Boeke Road,Evansville,

My N-dimensionalisoelectric focusing Polyacrylamidebride

And for her mother Jo,

Who I hope forgives me the naughty bits

And in memory of her fatherGene, Whom I loved

Epigraphs

Thus it is clear that thehuman race has at best a very limited capac ity for solving even straightforward social problems. How thenis it going to solve the far more difficult and subtle problem ofreconcil ing freedom with technology?Technology presents clear-cut material advantages, whereas freedom is an abstraction that meansdifferent things to different people, and its loss is easilyobscured by propa ganda and fancytalk.

Ted Kaczynsky

Industrial Society and Its Future

We have reached an age ofcheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.

Vannevar Bush

Aswe may think

I

BEAST

Todd Griffith was going to debug Kali or dietrying.

Thirty-six strobe linesanelectroencephalogram of the Kali chips brain wavesdanced in parallel from left to right across the fourmonochrome monitors in his cluttered office. The answer to theriddle lay hidden within them, and he knew that if he looked hardenough he would eventually find it. Unless,of course, he went mad first.

The chip was six months offschedule, and before Kali no chip of Todds had ever been late by so much as a millisecond. It was thecurse of the new guy. It had to be. Theoriginal design team of Todd and Casey had met their milestones with monotonous regularity. Thenmanagement had stepped in with characteristic stupidity,reassigning Casey to some skunkworks kludge and replacing her with Pavel the Weirdo. For the last ninemonths, ever since Pavel had taken over asTodds junior partner, glitches had popped up with distressingfrequency. Things that had worked before suddenly stopped working. And although it was tempting to blamePavel for the bugs, they always turned outto have been there in Todds logic all along, lying dormant. Week by week Pavel added more capability to theKali, and week by week this additional logic exposed the weaknessesin Todds original architecture, as acantilever added to the tenth floor of a building might expose aflaw in the foundation. Todd, in hisarrogance, had built very little debug time into the schedule. And, being a hardware guy, he resolutelyeschewed Brooks famous dictum to take nosmall slips. Therefore every new bug meant a new small scheduleslip, and every time the schedule slipped management became exponentially more pissed--and Todds lifebecame exponentially morewretched.