I’ve talked about the dystopia, the tech, and the music. Today I want to share some of the shady characters lurking in Cap City’s neon drenched mean streets.

First off, Serotonin Overload herself.

The girl leaned against her motorbike, arms crossed over her stomach, flicking the feeds with her optic. She was somewhere around nineteen, slightly built and boyish. Her hair was cut short and uneven, brown splashed with green and violet. A chill breeze stirred the hem of her sleek black coat, flapping the synthleather against the chassis of her bike.

When we first meet Sera, we know nothing much about her. She may seem like a fairly standard cyberpunk protagonist, more trope than character in the first blush. We’ll get into her head almost immediately, however, and spend the rest of the book with her thoughts.

Sera has a lot of those, mostly the tortured and obsessive kind. She suffers severe panic attacks, for which she takes medication. It’s this anxiety disorder that inspired her street name, the ironically chosen Serotonin Overload.

She wasn’t born in Capital City. She comes from a remote enclave in the mountains outside the city. Her people reject the future. Eschewing all modern technology, they live off the poisoned land as best they can. Sera wasn’t having that, and lit out for the bright lights of the big city.

She found the aforementioned dystopia, and wasn’t much having that either. But she quickly made friends with a couple of seedy lowlifes. One, who goes by the handle Siege, runs a body shop called Cap City Chrome, where Sera acquired her first implants and started learning her way around high tech gear. The other calls himself Random Access.

Rand was tall and thin with a narrow face. His hair was long, unkempt, and lank. It hung over his face, but never in his eyes. His skin was rich brown, his eyes dark behind the faint shimmer of implants. His left hand, where it emerged from the stained coatsleeve was a gleaming metal prosthesis. He perpetually smelled of machine oil and stale perspiration.

Rand most often works out of an undercity bar six levels below the surface, a dark and smoky place where algopunk bands sweat and scream on a tiny stage and the bartender has pink and blue hair. He’s a fixer, sometimes a finder, sometimes a thief. He finds use for Sera’s talents.

Together, they’ve run a few jobs. Be it hijacking a self-driving robotruck in the uninhabited badlands outside the City, or hacking a crooked cop’s personal files for blackmail material, they live on the wrong side of the law. But as our story opens, Rand’s latest job for Sera is going to prove more than either of them bargained for…

You can preorder Serotonin Overload in ebook or paperback from a variety of stores!