Set in near future Washington, DC, Miles Joyner’s new technothriller, Shifta, seems almost too plausible, despite its futuristic touches. This is his second book about the Bazaarverse, a site on the Dark Web that functions as an assassination market. Because I hadn’t read the first book, Bazaar, it took a bit for me to get up to speed on how the Bazaar works. Basically, people use the Bazaar to contribute via bitcoin to the death of a particular politician, business leader, journalist or other annoying individual within a specified 24-hour period. As more money is contributed in support of that person’s death, he or she rises in the Bazaar rankings, and by the time someone reaches the Top 100, they’d better not be accepting rides from strangers.
Karen Uzunma owns an elite executive protection service called Raptor. Her brother Yemi is its operational head. They have assembled a team of talented and dedicated security and computer professionals, and their clients are some of these public figures at risk. The Bazaar has no real hierarchy to dismantle, the potential assassins do not know each other, and they stand to gain millions in the payout for a successful hit. The size of the payout means the potential assassins can invest in highly sophisticated communications technology and weaponry, including predator drones.
For all those reasons, conventional law enforcement is not well positioned to put a stop to it. All public figures can do is lie low – for people like these targets, that’s hard – or hire a firm like Raptor, hoping that after 24 hours, the threat will have expired. But even a sophisticated and nimble protection service like Raptor is, to some extent, constantly playing catch-up.
This all seemed rather futuristic, the possible end point of the current prediction marketplace if it were to take a terrible turn for the violent. Then I logged into the Washington Post this morning to find that a geographically dispersed group of at least eight men, who met on TikTok and did not know each other, not even their confederates’ real names, had plotted to attack the White House last June during the Ultimate Fighting Championship hosted by Donald Trump. They had amassed guns, bullets and body armour, they had arranged car pools to drive across several states to the nation’s capital, they planned to launch explosive-laden drones and deploy snipers. The plan was foiled, only four days before the UFC event, when the mother of one of the teens overheard her son discussing the plot and called the police.
The newspaper report made me want to turn back to the first page of Shifta and start reading anew. The Raptor team is hired to protect an Ohio Senator, #94 on the Bazaar list, and soon learns the safe house where they’ve stashed him is not nearly safe enough. Worse, one of their own is missing. He and 23 other individuals have been kidnapped. They are being held in separate locations, and their torture is being livestreamed. One will be killed each hour that Raptor doesn’t give up the senator’s location.
It all sounds rather extreme, but… there’s today’s real news. One of Raptor’s operatives uses the term ‘shifta’ to represent ‘the opposition,’ which emphasises that the relationship is transactional, not ideological.
The Raptor team is mostly African-American, and several have grown up in Africa, Jamaica, Guyana and elsewhere, and their street slang wasn’t always completely familiar to me. Still, it leads to authentic voices and you should have no trouble understanding the gist of what’ wa’s being said. They mostly work in environments that could be anywhere – safe houses, SUVs, but where locations in the District and surrounding locations in Maryland and Virginia were in play, they struck me as authentic. When the bad guys remotely took control of the SUV the Raptor team was driving through rural Maryland – now that was scary!
It’s a fast-paced story, with many resonances with the way social media at times seems to be heading. Today’s toxic politics fuelled by social media, the frequent real-life reports of threats to public figures that have become almost routine, and the shortening timeline between when someone gets the notion to commit violence and has the means to carry it out – all these destabilising trends come together in this book. One can only hope it isn’t prophetic. The writing is a little rough in places but the strength of the ideas more than makes up for it.
Miles Joyner is a DC area fiction writer who explores the effects of technology on society and has worked in film and television. You can read our interview with him here.
Also try Cloudthief by Nathaniel Rich or The Blockchain Syndicate by Robbie Bach.
World Castle Publishing
Print/Kindle
£14.11
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
