FORBIDDEN SHADOWS

Forbidden Shadows takes place in the year 2186, where hybrids exist. Hybrids have technological body parts that enhance their abilities. If someone has hybrid eyes, they would have x-ray vision, night vision, heat vision, microscopic or telephoto vision. Hybrid ears would allow the hybrid to hear a whisper five miles away. Hybrids legs would let the person run as fast as a cheetah, and hybrid arms would make them as strong as a gorilla.

This technology is illegal and outlawed by the government. If the hybrid police, a government agency, finds a hybrid, they will remove all technology, known as the cleansing process. The survival rate is dismal. If a hybrid survives the cleansing process, they are thrown into an internment village for the rest of their lives so they don’t go out into the world to find new hardware. Vigilantes and mercenaries, known as hybrid hunters, also hunt hybrids. For them, it’s for sport, profit, revenge, and any other reason they can come up with. Hybrid hunters don’t give hybrids a chance to live like the government does, if you consider what the government does a chance to live. Hybrid hunters kill their prey and sell the hybrid’s biological and technological body parts on the black market.

16-year-old Asher has technological implants in his brain. He’s smart, very smart, and has a memory so powerful that he can remember a conversation word-for-word that he heard when he was two years old. Asher’s a walking calculator. He can solve the most complex math equations almost instantly without using a computer, calculator, or other device. His brain has three small hybrid chips, so it doesn’t engulf his entire brain.

For the first 16 years of Asher’s life, he lived at an estate off the grid with his mother, 30 hybrid orphans, and a couple of other adults. Asher was content there and had no desire to see what the world was like outside the stone wall surrounding the estate. Then, one night, the two most-wanted hybrid hunters raid the estate. Asher barely escapes alive. Blaming himself for the attack and death of his mother, Asher decides not to meet the others at the safe house. He couldn’t bear the thought of telling them that the attack and his mother’s death were his fault.

Asher decides to find his estranged father. His father didn’t even know that Asher existed. Together, they decided to hide Asher in plain sight onboard the Earth Alliance Junior Academy Starship, the NAS Pocono, where Asher’s father is a hospital corpsman. 

There, Asher experiences a formal classroom setting for the first time, his first bully, his first love, and the first time he cannot speak to anyone about being a hybrid. For if the wrong person finds out, Asher will surely die.