Heart and Soul

Content levels

Trigger warnings

Positive tags

Hero archetypes

Protagonist archetypes

Tropes

Themes

Synopsis

My name is Jimothy Van Done, or that’s what the orphanage birth certificate says. Jimothy. I hate that name. I bet some lazy clerk misspelled Timothy. Anyway, that’s just one of many things I hated about my life, but there was very little I could do about it. The corporate orphanage owned us. They housed, fed, clothed, and educated us. If you were smart enough, they gave you specialized training. If you did well in those classes, you were sold to corporations to continue your training and were put to work maintaining corporate equipment. I will admit that I had it better than some others, but I studied hard and worked hard to succeed. Then I found out the game was rigged. The corporation never had any intentions of letting any of us leave their employ. I was a tier-one asset, which was just another word for slave. I wasn’t sure how, but someday I would figure out a way to escape. My opportunity came unexpectedly when I went on an off-book job for one of my monitors. He’d gotten deep in debt with the wrong people, and to pay his debt, I had to do a job. The job was to repair a malfunctioning autodoc. No big deal, I repaired equipment like this all the time. However, this was the first time a sentient nanite AI was involved. They were trying to steal the AI, and he was blocking access to the autodoc he was in. Well, as they say, it’s all fun and games until an eye gets poked out. Or, in my case, a firefight breaks out, where I was shot three times. I woke up in a ventilation shaft, in bloody clothes, with a nanite AI who had taken up residence inside me. To add insult to injury, the corporation would do anything, or kill anyone they had to, to get the AI back. Yeah, my life just keeps getting better and better.

Tags

Heart and Soul: content & age rating

Intended for adult readers (18+).

This dystopian sci-fi features a protagonist trapped in corporate slavery who gets shot multiple times in a firefight and bonds with a stolen sentient AI. Contains strong violence with blood, moderate language, and themes of corporate exploitation.