To download any of these free stories, just click on the Title — of course, D. Allen Gilman retains all rights.
The Trials of Ostrander
In the early 1980’s Dr. Ostrander, a brilliant but unorthodox bio-scientist, is recruited by a budding Chicago Biotech Company named Hologenisis. Their vision is to tank-grow human rejection free replacement parts using therapeutic cloning. Utilizing newly created computer database systems, their work is growing at unprecedented rates. That is until Sun Times reporter, Diane Coltre, gets an anonymous tip that the company is actually trying to clone a human.
In this prequel to Minerva’s Gambit, the spiritual bounds of humanity are examined – do our actions determine us? How much of our lives do we actually control?
An Old Man’s Game
Andrew Connally, a 25 yr old off-grid nobody, is contacted by a step-sister he never knew existed. In a somewhat perplexing phone call, she tells him of an inheritance left by their mutual mother. Although the money is not significant, she has an exciting proposition for him—rob the bank she manages. With the inheritance to fund the caper, her plan is for him to “wait out the heat” for six months in a retirement community posing as a sixty-seven-year-old resident. Once there, he soon finds the true definition of purgatory. Risking his cover by deciding to interact with the residents, he discovers a whole new world he had never imagined possible.
The “heat” is supplied by Treasury Special Agent James Caperneski, who needs to find the robber in the three weeks he has left before mandatory retirement from active duty. How is he going track a parentless nobody, a social ghost, whose last public event was a transfer from Juvenal Penitentiary ten years earlier?
The Old Man’s Game is a story where two worlds meet, and the bindings of age become strained.