Pulse-pounding and moving in equal measure

THE FEED
by Nick Clark Windo
Headline, January 2018

In the future society no longer needs iPads, tablets, or iPhones to access the web – THE FEED is omnipresent, downloaded directly into our brains. Every interaction, every emotion, every image can be shared with anyone you want: colleagues, lovers, even the whole world. A few resistors refuse to get it, instinctively distrusting what it can do, but its proponents point out that you can switch it off if you need to do so. But you won’t switch it off. No one does. Tom has his reasons for hating The Feed. His dad invented it. But his wife Kate feels differently. She’s expecting a baby, and she can monitor and track every aspect of the pregnancy through the feed, like having a doctor by her side 24/7 but better. When The Feed goes down, suddenly, and without warning, the world crumbles fast. Six years after the assassination of their President, technology no longer exists. The feed is gone, and with it a huge chunk of the transient knowledge which people downloaded, never to remember again. More troubling even than the global collapse is that something – someone? – seems to still be able to access people’s minds: you go to sleep as yourself, and wake up as someone completely different, with a whole other personality inside your head. When Tom and Kate’s six-year-old daughter goes missing, they set out to find her. But who can they trust, when even your own mind isn’t safe? And who, or what, is taking over people’s minds – and what do they want with Tom?

Nick Clark Windo has been working as a communications coach for a variety of individuals and companies, while also producing films. He runs an independent script-development fund and recently graduated from the Faber Academy’s ‘Write a Novel’ programme.