Cyberpunk/Urban Fantasy Fiction
Release Date: July 23rd, 2025
Publisher: Acorn Publishing
If you make a deal with the Devil, don’t forget to read the fine print.
Three operatives find themselves on the run after a corporate sabotage job goes awry. Now, their predatory employer, a heavyweight weapons-tech firm, wants its elite A-team dead at all costs. Jon is a smooth-talking charmer. Friedrich is a hacker prodigy. And Guion is the ice-cold tactician who keeps them all in line.
Backs against the wall, the men strike separate infernal pacts to stay alive. They vanish into the urban badlands of New York’s Five Hives, vowing to lie low and figure out why they’ve become targets. Meanwhile, Jon suspects there’s an insidious evil possessing his friends, and he wonders if they all got more than they bargained for.
Amid an escalating war between local gangs and the firm’s private shock troops, the fugitives uncover a conspiracy that threatens to destroy everyone they know and love. But can they stop the destruction before their inner demons seize control?
Fucked.
That’s how Jon read the mission timer that blared an angry red in the corner of his Augmented Reality overlay. Technically it read numbers, but he translated them to what they really meant. They were late. Really late.
15:07
15:08
15:09
An image of Guion’s face appeared below the timer, a rendering of his athletic angles, sharp jawline, and tight side flattop cut in holographic glass that glowed. “Is he dead?”
Jon shook his head as if Guion could see him. “No. His interface unit still shows a heartbeat.”
“It could be hung in a loop. Or maybe the display’s been hacked.”
Jon reached out for the illusionary silver sphere that hung in AR over Friedy’s Master Interface Unit. It shone brightly in the room lit only by the incidental glow of status lights studding the server cabinets that surrounded them. An onslaught of viruses waited to assault anyone daring such access, slagging their MIU and, if Jon knew Friedy, the brain tied to it too. But at Jon’s touch, it erupted into layers of radial menus like a flower blasting into bloom in time-lapse. He scanned the segmented rings, riots of color, and tapped a scarlet section. It clenched into a sphere and sucked the rest of the menu in before blossoming open again, this time into rings and segments all shades of red, each option another biometric. He pinched and twisted one option after another, prying each open and peeking at the data inside before closing it and moving to another.
“Brain activity, heartbeat, everything. He’s still all systems go.”
“Check manually.”
Jon knelt beside Friedy. The scrawny New Deutsche Republic native lay slumped against a cabinet, buried deep in the mathematically precise maze of machines, limbs sprawled and head lolling, drooling onto a bib bearing a cartoon figure in his same pose, wearing his same shock of wild, platinum blonde hair. The words "Badass Hacker" screamed out in blocky crimson underneath. A glowing green line scrolled across the little slab of screen that lay cockeyed on his chest and jumped at regular intervals, a silent EKG readout. One slim cable stretched from his MIU to a rubber nipple stuck to Friedy’s temple with a clear glop of conductive adhesive, a fancy piece of archaic tech. A second braided silver cord slid through a small hole bored through the glass cabinet door and slotted in a port in the server rack. The tower glowed with illuminated indicators beside him. Friedy said they reminded him of the hieroglyph-slathered walls of Egyptian pyramids rendered in iridescence. With his head lolled back and his mouth slack, Friedy looked passed out . . . or dead.
About the Author
At the age of four, Russell Anders started telling stories, often interrupting his mother during bedtime reading to ask, “Then what happened?” She always answered, “You tell me,” and his imagination conjured fantastical tales of dragons and dinosaurs.
He gravitated toward a career as a technical writer and writing coach for software companies. He also briefly served as a columnist for Dragon Magazine. One of his favorite hobbies includes tabletop role playing, especially as the game master. And yes, he's as cruel to the characters in his games as he is to the characters in his books; his players love him for it.
Russel lives with the constant canine companionship of whip-smart but goofy Sigurd, an English Mastiff (the best breed ever).
Daemones ex Machina is his debut novel.
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