from author Killen

The super September 10, 2015 issue of Electric Spec is in the works! We're proud to share several excellent stories with you. One of these stories is "Peacekeeper" by Jamie Killen. It's a SF story set in a very intriguing culture where 'nats' and 'synths' are pitted against each other...

About the story, Killen says:

This story started out as my way of playing around with noir/crime drama tropes: the hardboiled detective, the hooker with the heart of gold, the corrupt public official. Of course, being me, I had to end up with a story in which these tropes took the form of cyborgs in outer space.

The second major piece of this story was my realization that very few stories about conflict between humans and robots/cyborgs/cylons/etc stop short of full-blown apocalypse. Instead of the conflict escalating to victory for one side or the other or ongoing total war a la The Matrix or Terminator, I wanted to explore a world in which a human-cyborg conflict resulted in a fragile but workable peace.

The end result is a story in which the main conflict stems from the tricky details and competing interests that come with that peace.

Very interesting! Thanks, Jamie!