A New Novella Entitled The Moby Chronicles, Available as an ebook on Amazon

The Moby Chronicles is a tale of magical realism that begins in the West African country of Ghana as we meet an English journalist on assignment to write a story about the monster e-waste trash-heaps that lie outside the capital Accra. He encounters a young boy who spends his days digging through the piles of electronic junk in hopes of finding the greatest prize of all: a smart Moby device he can repair and resell. But, alas, without luck.

Soon we find the journalist on the other side of the world at an event that features the launch of a new Moby device at the flagship company store. Now we meet Nancy Wales, an attorney who has made a deal with a homeless man who agrees to camp out in a tent in front of the Moby Company store so she can get her husband the first new Moby released for his birthday. The homeless man, a former soldier of fortune, is an Iraqi war veteran who has fallen on hard times and finds redemption and atonement in a series of heroic acts he commits while camping out at the storefront. In the last part of the novella, the story shifts to a journey of discovery by two young engineers from Moby headquarters who travel to Mexico, to the infamous Zone of Silence, in hopes of testing the inner workings of an advanced Moby prototype. The device fails at first but then opens up in the desert sky to an Encounter of the Fifth Kind, much to the astonishment of the engineers. 

In the end, all elements of the narrative converge as the Ghanan boy and the English journalist connect and meet up again, this time with the ultimate Moby in hand, one that is destined to change forever how we see and feel and know the world around us. Magic does happen, in Tom Maremaa’s inventive and page-turning narrative. And with the power to dazzle and enlighten our sense of the world. 

Geek Love, an excerpt from The Moby Chronicles

History repeats itself—but hey, apparently only when it damn well wants to, so he figures and so it must be. 

Otherwise, who knows?

And who wants to know?

Me, I guess.

Danger awaits. 

Always.

Kiet is thinking to himself in a blur of reason and doubt, as he and Jingyi are packing up their camper van and getting ready to head south for their trip to La Zona del Silencio, in Mexico. The same trip their good friends Liam McDowell and Lucy Cantor undertook a while back with their mysterious N-cube, the one that could somehow magically stop the flow of time, at least momentarily, long enough to do some crazy wild things. We’ll repeat what they did and live to tell about it, maintains Kiet, his head clearing up from that fog of doubts and worries.

“No worries,” he tells Jingyi.

“Worries,” she comes back to him.

And they both laugh, Ha Ha Ha He He He, to dispel the tension they both feel coming over them, shaking them up and rankling in their bones like the jitters before a final exam.

“Got to test my mettle,” he says.

“Me too.”

“We’ll do it together, right?”

They are a couple in progress, in the works, as it were, working on it as they like to say, not married, not engaged, not truly committed to each other, yet a couple nevertheless on a mission. Kiet wants to test his prototype version of a new Moby in the desert and Jingyi has agreed to accompany him on the journey. They both have jobs at the Moby Company, he in Product, she in Engineering. And they’ve become a team in recent months, spending their days and nights together. He’s the Geek and she’s the Babe, as they like to call each other in private, although she is the one who writes geeky software code in Objective-C, Python and JavaScript, and has a Ph.D in computer science while he dreams up new product features and designs and spends an inordinate amount of time beautifying or babefying the offerings. 

“I’ll be your Jimmy,” he jokes with her.

“I prefer slaves to Jimmys,” she needles him back. “They’re more reliable, like robots.”

“Ha ha.”

The Company has authorized and underwritten their trip to La Zona del Silencio. The engineering folks and product managers want to see how the latest version of the Moby, the one still secretly in development as part of a skunkworks project, painted not in white but in colors of the rainbow, works under potentially adverse conditions in the searing heat of the Chihuahuan Desert not far from the Bolsón de Mapimí in the town of Durango.

“Hey, Babe, they tell me strange things happen out there, you know?”

“Like what?”

“Well, instruments and electronics of all kinds, all types go haywire. Bonkers! Telecommunications, radio signals, compasses, all don’t work at all. Weird stuff nobody’s been able to explain. Even some weird people, too. So I’ve heard.”

“People? Aliens, Kiet?”

“Maybe.”

Kiet Lin is thirty-three years old but looks about ten years younger. A childhood prodigy with a gift for science, he found his place in the sun at Moby. The Company has treated him well: he has earned the right to explore new things on his own without having to explain everything in advance to his bosses. He strikes an imposing figure: tall, lanky, yet big-boned, with broad shoulders. His hair is always cut short and brushed-up with globs of jell and he likes to keep a steady three-day stubble rather than a longish beard or goatee of some kind. He loves Babe, loves everything about her, although he is shy about sharing his feelings toward her. Jingyi Zhao is twenty-eight, with dark hair and piercing dark eyes, and a slim, waif-like body accentuated by soft, delicate hands. The hands are strong enough nevertheless to bang out lines and lines of computer code at lightning speed, the product of her years in school writing programs and working for the Company in MobyOS Engineering. 

“They even say that there’s a time portal out there in the desert,” Kiet says.

“Maybe we’ll find it,” Jingyi says. “The time portal.”

“Wouldn’t that be awesome?”

“Indeed. It would.”

“Hey, Babe, you ready?”

“I am.”

“So, we’ll be heading first of all to the Mapimí Biosphere, you know, the Reserve where they tell me radio signals get all scrambled and wacky and compasses, like, go haywire, and even where those crazy-weird people report sightings of aliens. You game?”

“I am. Let’s do it.”