The Amaranth Chronicles: Deviant Rising

A group of freedom fighters join forces with a cybernetic killer to escape a totalitarian government that wants them dead.

The Helix was created to revolutionize the way we communicate, connect, and share. It brought the entire galaxy to our doorstep. It gave us the ability to collaborate with a single thought, but even the purest of intentions can spawn terrible evil. What was once a vision of greatness has become something much more malevolent. Life, liberty, and love are now forbidden, and even reality is only what they say it is…

Extended Pitch

The story takes place some 600+years from now. Mankind has reached out beyond our solar system in search of resources to help sustain the Earth. Some 200 years prior to our story a colonial ship, head for the remote star of Epsilon Eridani, accidently stumbled upon a sort of gateway to a totally unexplored region of space ripe with fresh, Earth like, worlds ready for us to colonise them. As our story takes place the freedom the worlds beyond the gateway have is in jeopardy. The United Planets of Earth have crafted a technology that slowly takes over the minds of the people they wish to control. Now that Earth is totally dependant on the resources the Frontier worlds deliver to her, one colony world in particular is in the sights of the U.P.E. and their controversial Helix technology.

One man, a cybernetically enhanced agent and a member of an organization that stands to benefit the most from totally control, must oversee a particularly brutal mission to make sure the mind controlling isn’t destroyed by a group of freedom fighters. Along the way this agent, Cade, finds out just how deep the levels of control this technology has and ends up having a change of heart. Now he must work with the freedom fighters to expose the insidious nature of the Helix technology and help bring freedom to all worlds under U.P.E control.

About the Authors - Alexander Barnes

I'm a User Interface and Experience Designer out of San Francisco California. I was born and raised out here in the Frontier of technology and have had the amazing opportunity to have my name on several huge, world changing, technologies.

My first love has always been Science-Fiction. Big surprise, right? Bet you didn’t see that one coming. There's like only a handful of us Software Engineers in the world that love Star Trek and Star Wars, even fewer that write Sci-fi. Sarcasm aside, me and one of my best friends Christopher Preiman have slowly been assembling the world for “The Amaranth Chronicles” for the better part of the last decade.

A lot of the ideas for our story were born in a childhood together spent battling with plastic Lightsabers and taking the Enterprise to new unexplored regions of space that looked remarkably like the park down the street from our houses. Side note, the native people of that strange far off world use to trade in comic books. Over the course of many missions we returned home with countless specimens to study.

About the Authors - Christopher Preiman

I’ve been a lover of Science fiction ever since I was a little kid, and a lover of books ever since I realized it was the best way to get more Star Trek between episodes. I grew up in San Jose California And have been attempting to be an author since I was fifteen. In the meantime, I’ve been a chef, a massage therapist, a semi professional game master (I got payed for it once, it counts.) and for a very short time a film critic on Twitter, (until I got bored). I became involved in this project quite some time ago when Alex came to me looking for some help figuring out the villains for his story and just sort of stayed on because the mix of space opera and Saturday morning cartoon felt like a good fit for me.

How the Story Came to Be - By Alexander

I was in my early 20’s and living in a dark, damp, rotting little studio apartment in Fremont California. I was broke, had just dropped out of college and my girlfriend of five years had just taken off with one of my friends. I remember being so broke I would rummage through the couch every time my friends left for loose change just so I could buy $3.99 Burritos at Taco Bell across the street. To say it was dark times was an understatement but if I was really being honest with myself this was by no means the darkest point in my life. As with most paths worth walking the journey had milestones of both intense happiness and bitter cold darkness.

Since I was a child I had always sought solace in Science Fiction. Something about stories that took place on other worlds or in different times helped put real life into a digestible perspective. The teeth that life would use to gnaw on me somehow were dulled by the fantastic worlds and universes other people had invented and given the rest of us the chance to experience.

I was up one late rainy night unable to sleep. The sound of water droplets hitting the bottom of a couple of pans I had had to leave out to catch the leaks in the roof when I remembered a series of short stories I wrote as a kid. Maybe it was the point I was at in my life but I began dreaming of that little universe I had created in my childhood again. A couple days later I came down with one of the worst colds I had ever had. I was running a fever of 102F and was to poor to afford any type of medication. At the peak of the fever I remember my body feeling freezing cold while my face felt like it was about to melt right off my skull. I ended up curling up in front of an electric floor heater with a fleece blanket wrapped around me while I dunked my head in one of the large pots that by now had filled with cold rain water. It was literally the sickest I had ever been in my life. For the next few days sleep was elusive and when it did happen dreams were more like hallucinations. I had always found it funny that rather than the normal fears or joys a person might dream about mine seemed to be focused on that little universe I had began writing in my childhood. Maybe I was just trying to escape to my fantasy world, trying to focus on anything that would make life just a little more bearable in the moment. Regardless, the feaver passed but the dreams and thoughts didn’t. It was if Pandora’s box had been opened and all of a sudden I had all these ideas for places I had never been, technologies I had never seen and characters I had never met. It was overwhelming at first and obsession soon followed. Before I knew it I was sketching starfighters on napkins, rendering nebula in Photoshop and modeling entire otherworldly environments in 3D Studio Max… But this wasn’t enough. Soon the obsession had gotten so loud that nothing but putting a pen to paper would help silence it. For weeks I pour ideas in terribly worded scripts and treatments into an infantile version of Google Docs.

One day when helping take my grandmother grocery shopping I bent her ear with a few short stories I had dreamed up and she remembered some stories I had told her when I was a kid of a far off place I called “The Frontier”. She reminded me that her garage was filled with my old school papers and binders and that maybe some of those short stories I scribbled down on old notebook paper might still be around. After a short visit to that dusty, oil soaked, garage that I use to pretend was a fighter bay on a grand spaceship as a child, I found several short stories that were remarkably similar to the ones I had spent weeks writing. Teary eyed I brought them home and realized this little Universe had always been inside of me and had been growing with me.

It would be years before I was able to really start packaging the hurricane of thoughts, characters and ideas, into something digestible to for other people. Some time in 2009 I reached out to one of my oldest and closest friends, Chris Preiman. He and I had known each other since Kindergarten and had written more fantastic sci-fi adventures on the playground at recess than there were episodes of all Star Trek series combined. He and I began working on finding a way to tell a story that took place in this Universe.

For years we passed scripts back and forth. We texted each other Character pitches and we stayed up late many Friday and Saturday nights playing video games and bouncing ideas off of each other.

After spending months drafting centuries worth of back history for this Universe that we now both inhabited we decided to begin writing a novel. I remember thinking that if we only had a story to tell I could sketch, photoshop and 3d model anything I needed too to make it a comic book, an animated series or even a CG movie. So from there we shifted our focus to completing a single story that could be expanded both forward in the Universe’s timeline with sequels or backwards with prequels. The Universe was robust enough to be told in any medium we could imagine, but we needed to start with written words.

I don’t know if we thought we’d ever finish it but even after I had been lucky enough to experience being an uneducated college dropout whose technical art skills had been discovered by a CEO of a world renowned company and offered a six figure income to work directly for him, I still kept dreaming of that far off Universe Chris and I had woven. After my time with the company was completed I locked myself in a small bedroom for eight months of my life while Chris and I finally packaged what we could of our story into a novel entitled “The Amaranth”. A year later we published the book through a company called Xlibris. The edits were terrible, the grammar was dodgey (at best), and the way it was written was muddy and juvenile at times… But even with all the problems this published manuscript had we were shocked at how amazing the feedback was from our early readers. While people sighted the typological issues everyone fell in love with the story and the characters themselves.

One night a woman from across the united states added me on facebook saying she had found a copy of “The Amaranth” in a family owned bookstore and was intrigued by the cover enough to read it and was moved to tears by the story.

As the months rolled on Chris and I watched our GoodReads.com page fill up with posative review after posative review. Our friends and family had been more than supportive but the random reviews, a few by some of GoodReads top reviewers, told us we had crafted something, something with great potential. Shortly thereafter our sales nosed dived and the reviews stopped coming in. We had been relying on word of mouth, press releases and some feeble marketing on the publisher’s end to drive the book into the world but alas it proved to be a herculean task for our amateurly written Sci-Fi tale.

The one take away from this experience was just that we had been a little too eager to put years of dreaming out into the world before it was ready. As of the writing of this first post we are in the midst of taking the first edition of our crusade out of print and to replace it with a significantly more comprehensively written 2nd edition. This second edition is now being called “The Amaranth Chronicles: Deviant Rising”.

“The Amaranth” (1st Edition)

Chris and published what is known as “The Amaranth” about three years ago through a subsidiary of Author Solutions. It was a long battle but we got our manuscript out there and in paperback form. The feedback we got was phenomenal (I lived through the 90’s I can still say that.) Our Goodreads and Amazon.com page was filled with 4 and 5 star reviews. People absolutely loved our story and our character and seemed to be thirsting for a sequel. As we sat down and finished several different drafts for a series, we found that our original manuscript just hadn’t lived up to the potential it could have. We loved the story but hated how amateur the writing was. How could we possibly launch a successful sequel that sounded like it was written by a couple of guys in their early 20’s? That's when we decided to sit down and rewrite the entire book from the ground up in hopes of giving the already fantastic story a writing style that would be worthy of a series of sequels.

If you are a returning fan of the original you’ll be pleased to know that this is the launch pad for that sequel you’ve been bugging us about for the last three years. If you are a new reader we hope you enjoy diving into the world we have created for the very first time.