
by Bertrand - author of Floozman
Fred Looseman was once Chief Risk Officer of a global banking giant. After exposing a financial anomaly that should not have existed, he lost everything. Now he repairs cash machines and drinks too much. Then he begins to hear prayers. Not only human prayers. An old woman longing for release. A dog trapped in a glass cage. Workers, machines, forgotten things, and whole communities calling from the margins of the world. When compassion overwhelms him, impossible wealth appears at his disposal and Fred becomes Floozman: a wandering agent of extravagant Deliverance. He can buy almost anything. Understanding what should be saved—and what his miracles will cost—is another matter. A cryptic System records the consequences in Grace Units. It measures, warns, and refuses to explain. Then the calls travel beyond Earth. Floozman’s path opens onto orbital cities, space elevators, Jupiter’s frozen moons, and the Immediate Web, where avatars can be almost as real as bodies. There he becomes entangled with Janatone, a fugitive cyborg trying to return to a home that may no longer exist for her; a talkative artificial womb carrying a forbidden child; and Cosmitics, a corporation that has turned flesh, love, and evolution into fields of research and profit. What begins as a darkly comic story of unlimited money becomes a strange metaphysical space opera about abundance, exile, identity, and the stubborn desire of people, machines, and matter itself to be set free. Sometimes Floozman succeeds. Sometimes he makes everything worse.
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