Hello, let me start by saying I’m really glad you made it here. You may have clicked a link or browsed through other books to find this page, but, now that you’re here, you’re here with me.

I’m Michael E. Thom and this is my science fiction story. Some might call it cyberpunk since it has much to do with A.I. and hacking here and there. I’d like to think of it as a human story told through the eyes of something not exactly human, but not exactly artificial either. I’ve been writing stories for many years, mostly short stories, some of them published back in 90’s in small press literary ’zines and some published on the web. I also have been into table-top rpg games since the 80’s and usually, I’m the storyteller in the game. I’m telling you this because I think being human has more to do with storytelling than just about anything else.

We tell stories for every political agenda, every courtroom battle, every click-bait post on social media, everything we say to our family and friends and our accounts to our spouses when we come home from work. Our stories can get us arrested, set us free, get us a loan, get us hired, fired, accepted into college or make someone fall in love with us. All we have to do is make an appeal to our listeners’ emotions.

And that’s what my story Paladin Glitch attempts to question and explore. It is the story of Vera Randall, a 3D bio-printed assassin whose implanted memories have been interlaced by those of a real revolutionary. This seeds something within her that drives her to make her own irrational decisions. This gets her in a fragile place, for if she is discovered as a defector, the Prime Union, her creators, will surely destroy her and delete the glitch in her memories and simply reprint her. She will not remember her taste of this human agency. This life will be erased. Something even greater than she could’ve imagined happens then. She discovers someone who, like her, has discovered an evolutionary trait within the artificially manufactured, enhanced super-beings, triggered by a crystal indigenous to one planet. They can tap into a quantum link between emotions and the molecular structure of matter and change its form. This unlocked ability coupled with the memory implants of a revolutionary might indeed give rise to a revolution that will crumble the totalitarian Prime Union.

I hope you enjoy the chapters posted and keep in mind this is in the draft stage. I will be updating and revising errors as I find them. If Paladin Glitch gets funded for publication I will be appointed an editor who can help polish things up. Please feel free to drop me a comment on your thoughts, I look forward to hearing from you. I do this because I love to write and I hope people have a great emotional ride reading what I’ve written. Maybe you can be a part of my future of being able to write for a living. You can start by giving me a follow and sharing these sample chapters with friends. If I get enough interest on this site, I will certainly launch a pre-order campaign and who knows what might happen from there? Hopefully more books written ;)

About the Author

I live in Fort Smith, Arkansas, a population of a little over 86,000. I’m also a freelance illustrator of oil paintings, a tattoo artist, and a bartender. I spend lots of time researching astronomy and physics and I have been obsessed with science and space since childhood. I also play guitar and write songs, have been in three local heavy metal bands that did pretty well regionally. I’m married to my wife Rachael Thom and I have a daughter Vanessa, and two grandchildren. This is my first finished novel, though I have a couple trunk novels from the 1990’s that may or may not see the light of day. My current projects in writing are: The Crawling Haunt, a haunted house horror novel, Disruption of the Planes (working title), a fantasy series, and a short story collection of horror stories. I collect books, swords, skulls, and I play Dungeons and Dragons.