Someone — not the mailman; he’d have put this in the box — had stuck a card to their door.
There was no address on the envelope. No postal markings. No return address. It simply said Chloe in the middle.
The envelope was robin’s-egg blue — the kind of old-fashioned paper card that had been hard to get when they’d come to Highpoint in 2060 and was nearly impossible to get today.
But that was Highpoint for you. What was old was new here.
Andrew was over Chloe’s shoulder, curious. “What is that?”
“I think it’s a birthday card.”
Chloe couldn’t see Andrew’s face with her eyes on the envelope, but she knew it had scrunched in confusion.
“From who?”
“Don’t you mean whom?”
But Andrew was more intrigued than playful. “Not the McAllisters. We’ll be seeing them later today.”
Chloe turned the card in her hands. There was a simple way to learn its secret, but for some reason, she couldn’t bring herself to open it just yet.
There was something odd about it.
Something that made her old intuitions tingle.
“Open it,” said Andrew.
Fingers shaking slightly, Chloe did.
Inside was a simple sort of birthday card — exactly the kind of thing they carried at Highpoint Drug. There was a photo of a tabby cat on the front with a stern expression. The caption read, Another birthday?
Chloe opened the card.
Below the punchline (Unacceptable!) was a sentence scrawled in angular, authoritative handwriting: Your seed imprint on The Beam has matured. It’s time to come home.
Below that, the sender had scrawled a message, either ironic or dutiful:
Happy Birthday.
And below it all, the card was signed.
It simply read, Dad.
SO WHAT’S NEXT?
The story of The Future of Sex has finished, but the world has just begun.
FOS takes place in the world of The Beam — a science fiction (non-romance) series written under my other pen name, Johnny B. Truant. The Beam was begun before I wrote FOS and will continue after finishing it. In its pages, you’ll see names you already know: Clive Spooner, Alexa Mathis, the mysterious Noah West … and, once Season Four is ready: Chloe Shaw.
The Beam is a science fiction serial about our hyperconnected future … and the power and politics that rule us.
Click here to buy The Beam: Season One
SHIT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Whew.
You guys have no idea what it took to write what you just read.
It was a monumental task for many reasons. And honestly, if you want the full story and some (I think) damn interesting insights about the process of telling this tale, you should probably listen to the “Backstory” episode about The Future of Sex.
But for now — for this author’s note — let’s just say that FOS was a long time coming. And let’s further say that writing this story after writing all the other things that touch the world FOS inhabits was a bit like tailoring a custom suit … and only then trying to find the perfect person to fit inside it.
It all started with The Beam.
If you’ve followed me closely, you might know that I write science fiction and a ton of other genres under the name Johnny B. Truant and that I have a partner named Sean Platt. Together, Sean and I started a series back in 2013 called The Beam. That series takes place in the year 2097 after an intelligent super-Internet has basically taken over our lives and a few power brokers have consolidated the pulling of the populace’s puppet strings into their own greedy hands. The Beam is part techno-thriller, part political suspense, part … something else. It’s one of our best series (the audiobook of Season One was nominated for an Audie award; Neil Gaiman made the announcement), but more importantly, it’s our richest WORLD. By far.
The world was so interesting to us, we couldn’t stop writing new stories. In addition to the core series of The Beam, we wrote a few shorts that shared many of the same figureheads and lore. We wrote a fake nonfiction book called Plugged — a Malcolm-Gladwell-esque take on the growth of the Beam AI network and how its ubiquity changed humanity’s brains. We wire-framed another fake nonfiction book that hasn’t been written (yet) … and of course, we wrote the first installments of The Future of Sex, set in the year 2060 — almost 40 years before events in the core Beam series.
As we wrote more in the Beam world, the lore grew thicker and thicker. We hadn’t just written characters; we’d written family histories. We hadn’t merely created fictional businesses; we’d crafted a series of power moves and takeovers as those businesses grew.
We hadn’t just created the world’s economic system (Directorate versus Enterprise); we’d built a corrupted history of backstabbing and power plays as those parties (and the people behind them) rose to power.
It was in that state — with years of Beam lore floating in my head — that I wrote the Trevor’s Harem series, starting with The Burning Offer. I knew Daniel’s company was a sex empire … so I figured: why not make that company the predecessor to O, the sex empire in the “already-started-but-stalled” Future of Sex series from our Beam world?
Once that decision was made, introducing you to Alexa Mathis and Parker Barnes felt sensible. Just for fun, you understand.
But it quickly became more than “just fun.” Thanks to those connections, I was accidentally writing new chapters of Beam lore. And as I wrote more in Aubrey’s world, the threads kept coming. By the end of Trevor’s Harem, you had a peek inside, but didn’t really know what you were peeking at. The ideas could have died there, as I took a hiatus from “big story stuff” and wrote three standalone books: Gagged, Hotel Indigo, and Almost Wrong.
But of course the ideas didn’t die. Turns out, the notion of cross-threading the Beam world into the Aubrey Parker world was only hibernating.
Because when I started the first Trillionaire Boys’ Club book, I knew it wouldn’t be enough for the powerful Syndicate of billionaires to kind of exist. Nope. Those guys had to be doing something. They had to have a plot. Hell, they needed to be planning to take over the world.
Well. The seed was already planted back in Trevor’s Harem. Why not let it blossom? In The Future of Sex, the O Corporation had basically already taken over a corner of the world by the year 2060. Since the TBC series was taking place in 2016-2017, I could nudge the Syndicate toward that future. They’d have over 40 years to dominate the world Future of Sex style if they played things right. And hey: they’re smart guys — a little evil, sure, but smart. Given 43 years, they’d figure something out.
Or perhaps Alexa — who kept showing up more and more in the TBC books and who I knew was already central to FOS as it existed at the time — would put it all together.
After I wrote The Guru (the sixth of the Trillionaire Boys’ Club books and the one that spins off into FOS), I went back to the old, half-complete Future of Sex project and knew I needed to finish it. When Sean and I tried to write it the first time, under yet another pen name, it had a different vibe and was lacking all of its present depth and flavor. It was also only six episodes long instead of the twelve it became. I didn’t just have to write more installments; I also had to rewrite what already existed.
And so the work began.
If the worlds were to collide — if the Syndicate and Eros had become the forebears to O — that meant there was a lot still missing from FOS. I went through the six episodes we already had line by line, making sure they agreed with what had happened so far in books 1-6 of the Trillionaire Boys’ Club series. And as I did that, I learned a lot about FOS that gave it depth it hadn’t had before.
In its first version, the events in FOS just sort of happened from nothing. We knew there was a sex company called O, but not how it was born. We knew there was a prodigy named Chloe Shaw, but not who she truly was. We knew powerful people had re-engineered society’s morals to make way for O’s unlimited
profit, but not who those people were. So on the rewrite, I added names we’d learned in the interim: Caspian White, Nathan Turner, Daniel Rice, and so on. And Caspian White again, just because he’s motherfucking Caspian.
And then the fun began. We had to write the second half of the unfinished story: to figure out who Chloe was and why she was here. But not just that — not just concluding the FOS story arc we’d left to dangle years before. We also had to make sure everything in FOS jibed with everything I’d set up in the TBC series and Trevor’s Harem. And on the other end, FOS had to jibe with the Beam world, as it already existed 37 years further down the timeline.
Every series got better as we reverse-tailored the “custom suit” that was FOS — working to make it fit a massive world’s worth of lore and timeline and causation that predated it.
FOS got better with the richness of Aubrey’s world — with, again, my favorite part being the inclusion of Caspian as a major character. The TBC series improved, because readers of FOS finally got answers to most of the mysteries I’d been teasing in Aubrey books for over a year. And The Beam — the series you probably haven’t explored yet — got better, too. Because from the beginning, Noah West was a — no: THE — central character in The Beam. But he’d been a mystery as well — even to me and Sean. Now Noah has new history, too. And we’ve unwrapped a bit more of the grand puzzle.
Chances are, if you’ve read this far, you’re a romance reader. Some of our sci-fi readers will come to FOS from the other direction, from the Beam side … but I doubt that there will be many. Sex scares readers off from other genres. But you, assuming you’re a romance reader, understand it’s part of life. It’s part of what makes us human.
And that, in the end, is what The Future of Sex is all about: what it truly is to be human. O tried to create an eroticized world they could sell. But in the end, they learned what we already know. To be human is to be flawed, emotional, and less than perfect. The future isn’t one of hypersexuality. It’s one of connection. Of love.
So to you, probable-romance-reader-who’s-come-with-me-this-far, I say this: Perhaps you’d like to come with me a little bit further.
FOS is, I think, perfectly half and half. It’s fully romance as a complete arc, and it’s fully science fiction. If you enjoyed the sci-fi in this story and want to know more, I have good news: There is much, much more. You will find it in the world of The Beam … if you’re willing, for just a little while, to try another genre and temporarily set romance aside.
(It won’t be for long. I KNOW how fast you read.)
In The Beam, you’ll find more answers. You’ll learn what happened to the world after Alexa and Chloe aborted O’s change. You’ll see what the nascent AI, imprinted on Chloe, did to bring forth the world’s next generation. You won’t meet Chloe Shaw again until Season Four, but don’t worry: there’s so much more out in this vast future of ours to explore.
Come join me, won’t you?
Season One of The Beam is here: https://sterlingandstone.net/book/beam-season-one/
See you on the other side.
Aubrey Parker
March 2017 (and into 2097)
P.S: If you’re feeling keyed up after finishing this book and want to discuss my stuff with other readers, you should absolutely join my Facebook reader group here. There’s even a sub-group in which you can geek out over Future of Sex spoilers that you can join here.
LEARN THE STORY BEHIND THE FUTURE OF SEX
Want to know how this book was written? Back Story is our podcast where we talk about the creation and writing of all our books. Follow the link below to hear how we took The Future of Sex from concept to completed work. It’s like DVD extras, but for books.
Go here to get the Back Story:
http://sterlingandstone.net/go/FOS-backstory/
The Future of Us (The Future of Sex Book 12) Page 8
