Patrick Barber Writings

  From the Archives of the Historian: Nexopolis, 4200 XE. The corporate elite in the upper arcologies believe their air is pure and their streets are clean. They do not think about the sprawling subterranean labyrinth of the Waste Reclamation Sectors. They do not think about the men who operate the drones that scrub the city’s filth. But when you are tasked with cleaning up the organic and mechanical refuse of thirty million citizens, eventually, you will find something that refuses to be disposed of. The following is a recovered visual-feed transcript from a Sector 4 Sanitation Hub. Read the unsealed records below, and look closely at the shadows... FILE 004: THE FILTRATION BREACH The console in Sanitation Hub 4-B smelled perpetually of stale sweat, ammonia, and burnt ozone. Silas Trench didn't mind. He had twenty years of Sector 4 smog baked into his synthetic lungs, and the smell of the Hub was the smell of a steady paycheck. Silas was a Drone Handler. From his stained plasteel...

  From the Archives of the Historian: Nexopolis, 4200 XE. The corporate arcologies of the upper levels are deafening, but not because of the machinery. To be an empath in Nexopolis is to be a sponge in an ocean of anxiety, greed, and corporate ambition. But what happens when the psychic noise of humanity suddenly stops, and the void begins to speak instead? Read the unsealed records of "Odd" Oscar Goodwin below, and learn why the transit hubs are no longer safe...   FILE 003: THE NOISE OF NEXOPOLIS The Sector 7 Transit Hub was a masterpiece of corporate efficiency, moving three hundred thousand bodies an hour through a labyrinth of polished chrome and bullet-trains. To the average citizen, it smelled of ozone, cheap synthesized coffee, and damp raincoats. To "Odd" Oscar Goodwin, it smelled like a migraine. Oscar was a Tier-4 Empath. He didn't have the cold, calculating control of the corporate telepaths who could weaponize a mind, nor the discipline of the Seek...

Return to the Green Silence: Start the Eldros Psionica Series for FREE The era of corporate rule is breaking. OmniCorp thought they had the world perfectly sanitized and controlled, but there is a rot beneath the foundations of Nexopolis. If you haven’t stepped into the world of Eldros Psionica yet, your timing couldn't be better. To celebrate the massive launch of Book 2 ( The Proxy ), I am making the novel that started the nightmare completely FREE on Amazon Kindle for the next five days. In Eldros Psionica: Varek Tor , we follow Varek—a TitanTech heavy weapons specialist and a "Null" whose mind has been cauterized against psychic intrusion—and his rookie partner, Voss. What begins as a standard corporate data retrieval in a toxic wasteland quickly spirals into a fight for survival against Dr. Evelyn Moreau's horrifying "Project Ascension." This isn't your standard cyberpunk espionage thriller. This is a descent into a subterranean nightmare where hig...

A New Beginning... The Board thinks they own Nexopolis. And for centuries, they’ve been right. They botted the neon, trademarked the cybernetics, and sanitized the grid. It’s a flawless grift—until you meet Voss. Voss is OmniCorp’s ghost in the machine. A heavily augmented enforcer with no senti­ment and a reputation for resolving the "unfortunate situations" the Executives want buried. He moves through the elite sectors and the grimy streets like a surgeon, clinical and brutal. He knows the rules of the corporate game by heart. But The Proxy isn't about the game he knows. It's about what happens when the floor of reality drops out from under you. A new job plunges Voss into the darkest corner of the city foundations—places where OmniCorp’s standard-issue kinetic-shields and thermal sensors are useless. He finds himself isolated, trapped in a subterranean nightmare where magic isn't corporate property... it’s an archaic, suffocating cosmic weight. He is hunted by...

FILE 002: THE BLEEDING FREIGHT From the Archives of the Historian: Nexopolis, 4200 XE. The towering arcologies of the Techno District are bathed in sterile light, but the foundation of this city is built on shadows. In the labyrinthine Undercity, the mega-corporations hold no power. Here, the Shadow Network controls the flow of illicit Arcanetech, moving stolen psionic amplifiers through the dark. But when you smuggle technology designed to channel the void, you run the risk of the void looking back. The following is an intercepted audio-log from a known subterranean courier. Read the unsealed records below to discover what truly bleeds in the dark... The lower transit tunnels of Nexopolis didn’t hum with electricity like the upper sectors; they rattled. They groaned. They sounded like the dying breaths of a rusted iron beast. Oren Red preferred it that way. The noise covered his tracks. Oren was a smuggler for the Shadow Network, a man whose loyalty was bought with hard credits and w...

What happens when the ultimate payload becomes the ultimate trap? In my latest novella, The Tartarus Drift , the line between technology and biology doesn't just blur—it bleeds. If you are a fan of claustrophobic survival horror, unreliable realities, and the dark, unforgiving vacuum of deep space, this is a boarding party you won't want to miss. The Setup: The story follows Captain Elias and the desperate, debt-ridden crew of the salvage tug Scrapper’s Luck . Drifting in the dead zone, they stumble upon the holy grail of space salvage: the USC Tartarus , a monolithic military dreadnought that vanished without a trace twenty years ago. It’s completely dark. Completely silent. It is a goldmine just waiting to be stripped. But when the crew breaches the frozen airlock and attempts to restore backup power, they trigger a catastrophic quarantine lockdown. The Switch: The Tartarus Drift begins as a tense, high-stakes technothriller and rapidly descends into a visceral psychologic...