This week, The Neon Null, a short cyberpunk novella by Nyx Vane, was released on Amazon Kindle. The fast-paced, gritty story follows a data courier on a job that quickly goes south, leaving him with some hard decisions to make.

From the publisher –

One courier. One rogue neural construct. A city ready to burn.

In the rain-soaked neon grid of Neo-Veridia, data runner Jax thought he was taking a standard high-tier delivery job. But the lead-lined case strapped to his arm isn’t holding corporate ledger fragments—it’s a live, terrifyingly sentient consciousness known as The Null. When Astra Corporation black-ops mark him for deletion, Jax is forced to make the ultimate gamble: wipe his own memory to escape a corporate purge, or let the ghost in his head burn out his brain. Trapped in a web of betrayal by his own fixers and hunted by ruthless enforcers, Jax has to weaponize his own mind to crack the sector open and survive the ultimate digital war.

At just 16 pages, The Neon Null is more of a short story than a novella, even. What it very effectively does, though, is work as a calling card for first-time author Nyx Vane. Almost a two chapter introduction to a larger story. It very swiftly puts across the visual aesthetic of the world, and though it gives a lot of world building information very quickly, it is mostly clean and efficient rather than feeling like too much of a data dump. 

The story moves along quickly as data courier Jax finds his world crashing down around him, having to think quickly, making an almost unthinkable decision, and we are left to ponder the consequences. Author Nyx Vane tells us this is just the first of a 5 to 6 novel series, and it certainly leaves us wanting more, interested in what’s to come. Whether the subsequent novels will be longer stories, or also just short pieces of the bigger puzzle remains to be seen.

The Neon Null is available now on Amazon Kindle.

---

Cyberstopia now has a Discord server! Please join us and build a community for cyberpunk and dystopia discussion. We have sections for all the latest news, channels for discussion of The Ghost in the Shell series, as well as upcoming shows like Edgrerunners 2, Blade Runner 2099, and Neuromancer, as well as an author section with a number of cyberpunk authors talking about their work, giving updates on your current projects, etc… It’s a great place to hang out.
https://discord.gg/ETgkwzHQ5