Blind Speed Dating #16 (YA)

Title: ENVISION

Genre: YA science fiction

Word count: 103 000 words

Query:

When eighteen-year-old Naia, daughter of the world’s foremost neurotechnologist, witnesses her father’s murder, she believes his death is revenge for inventing the ports, revolutionary implants that transform human brains into computers. She flees his killers, intending to seek help from EnvisiTech, the powerful company responsible for marketing port technology.

But Evan, the secretive leader of the anti-port resistance, kidnaps Naia, insisting it’s for her own protection. She doesn’t know whether to believe his claims that EnvisiTech is behind her father’s murder or that the ports cause devastating physical symptoms, and the company is using them to manipulate minds for their own agenda. The situation escalates when an enigmatic terrorist group releases a digital virus, shadowing the city of Synergy with the threat of an electronic plague.

While struggling to come to terms with her father’s death and the possibility that he was involved in a twisted plot to control humanity, Naia must determine whom to trust. But it isn’t as simple as choosing a side. An unexpected discovery reveals her father’s legacy: the means to take down the enemy, which makes her both a threat and a target. She must find her place in the fight and face her growing feelings for Evan, whose real identity could be one of the greatest obstacles of all.

In a world where it’s possible to inload anything into your brain, it’s hard to discern the truth, and with tangled connections everywhere—synaptic, electronic, between people —making the wrong connection could be deadly.

First 250:

Perhaps something interrupts the stillness of the hall, a faint sound surfacing through the music in my head or a slight stirring of air. Maybe it’s the shiver that tingles up my spine and all the way to the nerve endings in my fingertips or the simple fact that the door is ajar. Whatever it is that alerts me, I know something’s wrong.

The kind of wrong that changes everything.

Stop, I command, and the song blaring between my ears immediately cuts out, the drumming of my heart replacing the beat of the music. I flatten a cautious palm on the door and swing it open wider, revealing the room beyond.

Against the backdrop of our trashed apartment, my father kneels on the carpet, shaking hands elevated in surrender, eyes wide behind his broken glasses. A masked thug holds a gun to his forehead.

Dad’s gaze darts in my direction. Horror-stricken at seeing me framed in the doorway, he defies the weapon and risks a warning. “EnvisiTech! Run, Naia!”

The thug’s head whips around, catching sight of me through the eye holes in his mask. There’s no mistaking the message reflected there: You’re next.

My fight or flight response kicks in, my body instinctively deciding on flight, feet moving of their own accord. Behind me, I hear my father bargaining with his attacker, pleading with him to leave me alone. I’m not banking on it. I tear down the hall toward the elevator, and the sharp sound of a single gunshot reverberates through the air.