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Although the action takes place in the year 2051, this first novel by Joshua Ortega is not exactly science fiction. It's more of a cautionary tale, especially tailored for our age.
The setting is the greater Seattle area, where an exponential rate of progress has, in less than half a century, produced a society that no longer has a middle class, where most people travel by ground-limited mass transit, but wealthy individuals --- and government workers, including police and other law enforcement --- take to the sky. "Cars" now fly. They can be flown both manually and by computer.
Everything, in fact, can now be done by computer --- and that is the point of this novel --- though it's a kind of computer control different from anything we have yet seen.
Our hero is an agent named Marc McCready. He's a Freemon, a kind of mid-21st century FBI guy. His job is to check out deviant thought patterns among the mass of the populace. This is possible because the Ordosoft founder, W.A. Huxton, discovered early in the century that all living things vibrate along a certain frequency. Therefore, they can be monitored on this frequency, and they are --- except the very rich, who can afford to pay the government what it costs for complete freedom of thought.
It was desire on the part of the people to have easier, faster access to all that the rapidly advancing technological world has to give that got everybody into this situation in the first place. Have you ever sat in front of your computer seething with impatience for a web page to come up? Looking for no-glitch broadband? Think it would be cool to have your house lights come on as soon as you set your foot in the door? Think it would be even cooler if your house could immediately identify if that foot belonged to somebody else, not you? Think how great it would be if your TV never let you forget the kind of program you usually like to watch, could get your attention and remind you even if you didn't know a particular program was going to be on? Well, see, all this and much, much more is possible --- all you have to do is have this tiny little chip thing implanted, painlessly, in your brain.
Having the wrong kind of thoughts is called "freeking." Many words are spelled phonetically 50 years in the future, which is not at all surprising, considering the direction in which the language is already going. When our story opens, ordinary citizens are freeking out in record numbers all over Seattle, and Marc is becoming concerned.
He gets sidetracked, or so it seems, when Mason Huxton, father of the founder --- who lives in a huge house that resembles a castle and is literally built in the air above Bellevue Island --- has a wife who freeks. Naturally, he calls on a Freemon for help, and the agency (read FBI) sends Marc. Mason, an interesting guy in his own right, soon finds that his wife's problem is only the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is something or someone called The Presence, who can only be perceived virtually. The Presence has found a way into the frequencies that control all life, and the Presence is a kind of revolutionary force. For good or evil? Ah, well, there's the Big Question.
Mason Huxton not only has a wife but also a daughter named Ashley (and a son, who doesn't appear often in the story); since his whole family is threatened, Marc is assigned to be Ashley's bodyguard. She is an interesting character, the future's version of a free spirit. Her inherited wealth means she is free from having her thoughts monitored, though Marc (being equipped, as a Freemon) can do it --- just as he can read the thought levels of Mason's troubled wife, who is a clone of the real, now-frozen wife. Ashley's thoughts are often in the orange and red zones, which are forbidden to most people. Marc's thoughts are often there too, which is the biggest reason for his chosen profession --- he wanted the freedom, and monitoring others was not too big a price to pay for it.
Ashley and Marc bear the seeds of revolution themselves and, as the story advances, Ortega demonstrates a powerful ability to draw readers into his created future world.
Although getting into it for the first few pages was a bit tedious, I soon found the book hard to put down. Ortega, who by profession is a journalist specializing in the coverage of technological issues, has a lot of worthwhile things to say and he says it well in this work of fiction. We should thank Jodere Group, San Diego publishers, for putting this book in our hands --- and I hope FREQUENCIES will win broad recognition for Ortega, so that he can continue to entertain us and make us think.
--- Reviewed by Ava Dianne Day
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