Bit Rot

A Novel

By: Jason Baronette

Narrated by: Bill Davis

When an aging athlete gets a second chance to help his family, can he survive the machinations of big tech gone mad?

Chicago, 120 years in the future. Elliot Lock limps toward the end of his professional dreams.

Hiding a bum knee and battling a constant ringing in his ears, the discontented football player’s opportunity to live up to his father’s legacy is crumbling as fast as his dad’s health. But when he’s offered a way to fix his parent’s brain injury in exchange for joining an innovative digital sports league, he stifles his doubts and signs on for a miracle cure.

Thrilled when his new employers fulfill their promise, the former quarterback works with his illegal AI friend to put together a titans team of physical players and virtual hackers. But when his father begins to exhibit strange behavior and a rebel investigative reporter delivers a cryptic warning, Elliot fears he’s stepped into a hardcoded lethal nightmare….

Pulled deep into a dark web conspiracy of clones and control, can Elliot expose the dangerous truth?

Bit Rot is the gripping first book in the Bit Rot science fiction thriller series. If you like wounded but resilient heroes, high-tech plots, and exploring what it means to be human, then you’ll love Jason Baronette’s visionary tale.

©2023 Jason Baronette (P)2023 Jason Baronette

Pulled Me In Within the First Few Minutes

Sometimes I start a book and understand within a few minutes that it’s going to be a book I’m going to fly through. That was the case with Bit Rot. I’d read some of the book descriptions when I posted it in my new and notable. And again when I said, “This sounds good today.” But picking something up and allowing it to surprise you is one of my favorite things. I’ve never read anything from Jason Baronette before this and dang did he knock my socks off.

At first glance it feels like it’s going to be about a new sport, it’s the near future and the NFL just isn’t want it used to be. This really starts to trigger and piss off Elliot Lock, who is nearing the end of his prolific career with his hometown Chicago team. His father’s legacy looms large over him when he’s approached to try out a new up-and-coming sport.

I thought that Baronette nailed both the sport and the little sprinkles of intrigue. This was one of those books that I thought would be much more about the game, but in true speculative fiction form, there was something bigger and darker looming in the background.

Now, to give this book the review it deserves I would have to spoil a lot of the things that Baronette keeps hidden behind intrigue and I won’t be doing that. But what I can say without hopefully ruining it is that this was one of the most interesting and unique science fiction/technothrillers I’ve read in a long time. It had the feel of an Eliot Peper book mixed with old-school Michael Crichton — where the science feels real along with the pacing of a seasoned Thriller author. I went into it thinking it was a sports near future book and left with my mind reeling.

Bit Rot is a book I won’t soon forget, and when I was grabbing some information from ‘zon I saw that there is another book in the series coming out. Hopefully, the audiobook will come out soon after or with it.

And, speaking of the audiobook, I thought that Bill Davis did a wonderful job. He was able to match the pacing and storytelling that the author threw at him and elevated it. He does use some voice-modulation for a few parts of the story and it was used sparingly enough that it didn’t bug me and especially at the end of the book it really added to the atmosphere.