In my dream, they were in the base exchange, the equivalent of a general store at U.S. military outposts. I knew it was night, and I knew the place was closed.
On a semi-lucid level, I also knew this was Janus Base. A top-secret installation in Romania, near a remote forest, where Net Force’s advance teams were launching operations against the technologie vampiri—their CyberGoth adversaries for the first story arc of the series.
It was a fictional place I’d invented, in a fictional world I’d been immersed in for the better part of three years.
He was a young soldier. In uniform. She, a young civilian who ran the exchange. Both were of Latino descent. There was an air of danger hovering over them, but they weren’t yet aware of it.
They stood on opposite sides of the sales counter, facing each other across it. The two of them alone in the near-darkness.
In my dream.
“Why the big smile?” she asked him.
“Because,” he said.
“Because why?”
“Because I can tell you really want to kiss me.”
Long pause. A knowing, ageless smile on her face.
“A woman wanting a man to kiss her isn’t eough,” she said. “She must invite him.”
He swallowed hard. He’d been waiting for weeks to know if she had noticed him at all among the base personnel.
“How will he know the invitation?” he asked.
“If he’s the right man for her,” she said, “he’ll know.”
And then I woke up, the dialogue still in my ears. It was like I’d been standing behind a shelf elsewhere in the exchange and overheard them.
I sat up, grabbed my cell phone from the bedside, and typed out very word in its notepad, blearly thinking I’d found the makings of a scene for ATTACK PROTOCOL, the Net Force novel I’d begun a week or two before.
This sort of thing happens every so often. Most of the time, though, I get up, splash water on my face, and immediately realize none of what I’d thumbed into the phone is remotely usable. Dreams have an internal logic and consistency that can be absurdly illogical and jumbled in the real world. I’d gotten tiny snippets of scenes from them before, snatches of dialogue …
But the last time I’d actually gotten a whole scene—with two clearly defined characters, and a big chunk of conversation—from a dream was, well, never.
Or at least not since I was ten years old, when I wrote my first extended story.
I knew instinctively that I’d hit on something.
The young man was Mario Perez.
The young woman was Laura Cruz.
They grabbed hold of their plotline and ran away with it, became essential to the heart and soul and magic of ATTACK PROTOCOL. In truth, Laura and Mario’s predicament set out the book’s dreamlike tone for me. They were the portal through which the coronavirus pandemic, relocation, isolation, and a sense of pervasive, constant dread seeped into my writing …
All of which translated into the story as intelligent drone swarms humming, barely out of sight, in the Transylvanian midnight sky; as stealthy robotic sentries infected with digital madness; as a castle of mazes, and torture chambers and death traps built by a paranoid medieval count, and now the lair of the master hacker/terrorist known as the Wolf.
NET FORCE: ATTACK PROCOTOL is a dark story, mostly taking place over the course of a single dark night, written in a very dark period for our world.
But if there’s a theme I try to get across in my fiction, it’s that love, faith and courage will get us through the absolute darkest of times. That they alone offer us a path to the light.
Laura and Mario constantly reminded me of that while I was working on the book. They still do.
And for that, I’m grateful to them.
JEROME PREISLER is the prolific author of almost forty books of fiction and narrative nonfiction, including all eight novels in the New York Times bestselling TOM CLANCY’S POWER PLAYS series. His latest book is DARK WEB, the first novel in a relaunch of the New York Times bestselling NET FORCE series co-created Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik. Forthcoming in November 2020 is his next NET FORCE novel, ATTACK PROTOCOL. Jerome lives in New York City and coastal Maine.
