Damocles - Introduction
Hello there. Almost two decades ago, I got off to a respectable start with the first German audio book podcast, my thriller 'Die Haut' (The Skin). After my 10 minutes of fame in the spotlight with book contracts, interviews, reading tours and podcasts, I went on with my life. I found a job, met my wife, got married, started a family and introduced some people to the magic of cinema with various film programs.
But all these years, writing was always with me. Every November, during National Writers Month, I would sit down and write another manuscript. Over the years, this has resulted in a number of interesting stories. Some of them are too good to let gather dust in my cloud storage. Thanks to the latest advances in artificial intelligence, I am now able to have my texts edited and translated well enough to bring them to life using a variety of artificial voices.
Every two weeks you can now listen to a new audiobook chapter from the Heinkeverse.
We start with my 12-part thriller from the future: Damocles.
The year is 2037 and implants have replaced smartphones. Any information now appears in the user's field of vision thanks to the augmented reality of the implant. These and other technologies have changed societies. The printed book has all but disappeared. Universities and libraries are on the way out. Self-driving electric cars and trucks dominate traffic. Cargo drones transport goods through the air. Rocket flights make it possible to travel between continents at high speed. Seamless satellite surveillance from space has made policing a desk job. Robots have made many jobs obsolete and redundant. The gap between the rich and the poor has grown even wider.
Unnoticed by the rest of the population, the wealthy elite is using the new technologies to their advantage. They meet in a secret, virtual space, the so-called ›Stream‹. The highly sophisticated implants of the rich give them unprecedented abilities. Digital, virtual assistants with their own consciousness help the rich as modern slaves to more wealth and power. In ›Observation Mode‹, the implant wearer can learn everything about his counterpart. In the ›Puppet Mode‹, the rich can even use their implants to control other people as if they were puppets. And the ›Damocles Mode‹ even allows the rich to kill without fear of consequences.
It is in this world that we meet Chief Inspector Joseph Lenke of the Bochum Police Department. On the verge of retirement, he is our link from the world of the present to the world of the future, which is dominated by technology.
