Monopol City — John Argo

You remember a time when you enjoyed playing board games like Monopoly around the kitchen table. You fantasized what it might be like to shrink down to atomic size. You'd become a tiny person in an virtual game world with life-sized trains and cities all around you. That subway has now arrived at your imagination station with this DarkSF novel by John Argo: Monopol City. All is not well--in fact, nothing is right--in this pocket universe and its city of danger and intrigue in this rainy city that resembles wartime Berlin. In a dark and glistening dystopia, East Gotha and West Gotha are eternal rivals trying to destroy each other in a war whose reasons nobody can fathom (a faceless but deadly Cold War). A young West Gotha woman mathematician named Tedda commits the ultimate crime of treason - she has an affair with the dashing Captain Alton Hedrock, a spy for East Gotha. Now Tedda's memories are wiped, and she is sentenced to serve in a strange university with programmers who tunnel under the other side's data defenses - literally. They are all prisoners of the state, with little to amuse them except a secret game they invent for their pleasure, using military technology. They call the game Monopol City. In the pocket universe of Monopol City, Tedda meets and falls in love with Edgar, a Rule like all things and all people in that miniature world. But Tedda's world is in danger of imminent destruction, and only Monopol City offers a means of escape before it is too late. Will Tedda and Edgar find happiness in Monopol City while the rival Gothas commit the ultimate act of mutual self-destruction? Read this dark, dystopian novel (think of the movie Brazil for bizarre) and learn the outcome. Do not pass go, don't even slow down on Boardwalk, but hop a metro from Gotha Square to Central Gotha Park...time is running out, danger is everywhere, and your number may be up at any second now. Reminiscent of 13th Floor, Inception, and The Matrix, this is a gripping tale of virtual realities. Worlds are destroyed and new worlds born - can Tedda and her allies reach safety just in time? Monopol City is a stand-alone novel in John Argo's imaginative, chilling series of DarkSF tales. Visit the author's webplex at darksf.com for more info.