Imagine a secret, hidden City that gives a second chance at life for those selected to come: felons, deformed outcasts, those on the fringe of the Outside World. Everyone gets a job, a place to live; but you are bound to the City forever. You can never leave.
Its citizens are ruled by a monstrous figure called the “Man” who resembles a giant demented spider from the lifelike robotic limbs attached to his body. Everyone follows the Man blindly, working hard to make their Promised Land stronger, too scared to defy him and be discarded to the Empty Zones.
After ten years as an advertising executive, Graham Weatherend receives an order to test a new client, Pow Sodas. After one sip of the orange flavor, he becomes addicted, the sodas causing wild mood swings that finally wake him up to the prison he calls reality.
A dynamic mash-up of 1984 meets LOST, Orange City is a lurid, dystopian first book in a series that will continue with the explosive sequel Lemonworld.
Legalized gambling in joints that resembled speakeasies. Strips for drag racing marked by burned tires and the occasional lost limb. Men and women prostitutes in darkened, life-sized glass tubes with computerized menus of everything they’d allow. Ear-splitting electronic music halls loud enough to literally stop you from thinking until you were consumed by the throbbing beats. Laughing Gas Lounges for those unable to laugh on their own anymore. Millions of different ways for everyone to spend all of their Stipends and release whatever had been pent up inside.
Graham zoomed there in a cab that cost him over a hundred Stipends, since he lived on the other side of The City. After passing through Empty Zones, the Downtown’s colored glass structures glinted in the night like a prism. Its energy made him tingle and he rolled down his windows to let it all pour in. The colored glass buildings were twinkling and delightful, candy for his eyes. Translucent screens of commercials hovered in the air above, schilling products. A digital forty-foot geisha hawking her Cream of the Orient lotion, her face powder white with a come-hither wink in her giant eye. Near her, an ad with two life-sized bees, post-coital, puffing on Smoke ‘Em cigarettes in bed and buzzing that Smoke ‘Ems were the bees’ knees. Graham’s creative team spent weeks on that one, and he was in awe that when the people of the Downtown looked up into the night, they were influenced by something he’d sacrificed many days to bring to life.
The cab sped until it hit Excess Street and the heart of the Downtown. A woman lay in a giant martini glass on the roof of a bar, beckoning for him to come inside. Nearby, a line of people in masks waited to get into Anonymous, a club that required you leave your identity
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