Andrew Rosenblum

I Am Not A Corporate Drone By Andrew Rosenblum

Child support woes have unemployed Bay Area journalist Fintan O’Rourke considering the unthinkable: a quick, easy job on the wrong side of the law.  He agrees to help a biohacker friend named Hal Marantz deliver 10 kilos of a gray-market stimulant — created to goose the endurance of Russian astronauts — to 28-year-old cryptocurrency millionaire Brendan Foley.  Technically, that’s drug-dealing — though Hal considers himself a “dissident for stigmatized medicines.”

When Brendan suffers a $134 million cryptocurrency hack and then a fentanyl overdose on his Marin yacht shortly after delivery, O’Rourke and Hal scramble to solve the mystery of his death, even as they become persons of interest in the crime.  “I would never sell poison like fentanyl,” Hal insists. So who did?

Brendan’s V.C. investor Gunnar Holst dangles a lifeline, with an offer of just the type O’Rourke has long sought: a fat contract to write about a cutting-edge experiment.  But first, the struggling reporter must help find Brendan’s girlfriend, who Holst claims stole the missing cryptocurrency millions and plans to make O’Rourke and Hal her patsies. 

So they pursue frightened yoga bros to their Gold Country panic room, junkies on the lonely road to recovery, and gangsters unhappy that the boss is getting into vegan cheese — who all claim that “biology is the new software.”  Is it any surprise that everyone they meet seems to be on something?

This 80,000-word thriller is Black Mirror meets Christopher Moore — by a veteran tech writer for Wired, PopSci, and the MIT Technology Review.

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