In a stateless future, Chamariko is the epitome of the city: five corporate skyscrapers at its heart, zones of destitution radiating outward. Samantha is an analyst desperate to get ahead, despite her own reservations about the cybernetic augmentations pushed on consumers by the corporations, so she takes a job with Advancement Industries. But when the assignment is uncovering the source of a potentially-catastrophic virus, it turns out her partner will be Johnny Vinz, the pinnacle of Advancement’s neural cybernetics experiments.
Mathew L. Brengman’s THE MAYHEM VIRUS is a love letter to classic cyberpunk, ticking all the boxes: corporate mega-greed, an ultra-dense urban space, blurred lines between the organic and technological, blurred lines between reality and fantasy. It expresses some of the pulsing energy of cyberpunk film with its brisk present-tense narration, giving the story a page-turning momentum. It’s bold and grandiose from the very first line: “The future is scary, and Chamariko is the future.” Samantha, meanwhile, is an interesting and appealing protagonist; as one of the so-called “organics,” who refuse any type of cybernetic augmentation (suspicious of the motives of mega-corporations but forced to depend on them to survive), she’s also a relatable, accessible entry point into a world destroyed and dominated by capitalism. Not to mention she’s a competent woman in spaces dominated by men. However, THE MAYHEM VIRUS tends to lose the thread of its prose. Often sharp and evocative as the protagonists move from the “the luminous symphony” of the corporate core to the outer slums of Chamariko, the descriptive language sometimes contorts itself into redundancies (“Johnny Vinz quickly surges over the couch with incredible speed”), apparent contradictions (“emotionless wave of rage”), or laughable blandness (near the end, the villain asks a question “in an evil tone”). There are a number of unresolved homophone errors (sites/sights, rental/retinal, to/too, etc.). There’s also consistent trouble respecting dialogue conventions; open or close quotes are sometimes missing, dialogue is set off with a period when it needs a comma or other punctuation, and words are capitalized as though belonging to a different sentence (“’Do you really think you’re thinking rationally?’ She asks”). These errors don’t necessarily obstruct THE MAYHEM VIRUS’ vision, but they do detract continually from the reading experience.
Unfortunately, the text also leans unusually hard on cliché. In its establishing chapters, for instance, the story introduces Zayyir, a gifted child hacker hunted down by Advancement Industries. Unfortunately, Zayyir is an extremely flat character with little humanity, so the traumatic sequence of his capture (and his father’s death) feels more like a parody than an emotional beat which will drive the character and plot. In one startling scene, Johnny Vinz looks into a mirror and sees a different person staring back at him, causing him to smash the mirror in shock; the scene is only startling because this is such a strong visual cliché, it’s bizarre to see it in prose. The overall plot structure is also a kind of cliché – an extremely loose investigation in which two mismatched personalities wander across the city trying to unravel a mystery. This can be a very profitable structure, but THE MAYHEM VIRUS doesn’t have the strong character work or prose style required to make this compelling; instead, Johnny repeatedly does some kind of off-screen tech magic and the protagonists dutifully hop back into the car, heading to their next destination until something actually happens. Without much real investigation, the payoff – in both plot and character terms – feels unearned. (Samantha’s arc is especially disappointing – she’s far and away the most interesting character, but ultimately does little and is sidelined by the plot.)
THE MAYHEM VIRUS clips along, so it can be a fun ride while it lasts, but in the end it doesn’t hold up to the sci-fi greats from which it draws so heavily.
Though its punchy, present-tense prose gives it some enjoyable momentum, Mathew L. Brengman’s THE MAYHEM VIRUS doesn’t distinguish itself well from better-known cyberpunk forebears.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader