Written in 1994, John Leekley envisioned a Road Warrior world of the American Southwest that is quickly becoming reality today, 2026, more than 32 years later… climate change has ended the rains, turning the entire landscape to empty desert, and the heat is too great for cities to survive, so the shopping malls are now empty forever, becoming battle grounds. Los Angeles is covered with a ten mile wide dome for protection, and outside that dome are the Zones, occupied by marginalized people, ruled by brutal governmental sponsored enforcers.
In this vast desert borderland, Jake McQueen drives illegal cargo across the border, including folks he calls “pilgrims”, for whatever money they can pay. In a massive monster truck built to withstand the high tech weapons of the border guards, he battles the entire corrupt system as a smuggler. He is pursued by his own brother, Will, a federal marshal, who hopes that by catching Jake, he can keep him from being killed.
Hannah Jake Tyree, a brilliant young programmer and ultimate stakes game designer for the powerful and dangerous Chrysalis Corporation recruits Jake after he is caught and imprisoned, securing his release. Jared, the diseased architect of Chrysalis’s virtual-reality empire that rules LA’s Dome, is obsessed with immortality, having discovered how to own the human mind with AI and replace wounded or diseased parts with those from healthy humans. When Hannah is murdered by Jared, to bury what she’s uncovered in cyber space, Jake rescues her consciousness at the threshold of death and uploads it into a neural interface, a crystal.
Jake installs this powerful crystal now controlled by Hannah’s consciousness into the dashboard of his custom Mustang. A wasteland fugitive suddenly has a partner no one expected: a woman of code, fully aware, fully herself, riding shotgun inside the machine.
Together they go to war against Jared in a chase that runs from a Mars-red desert to the heart of LA’s fortified Dome.
A 1994 vision that arrived a generation early. Uploaded consciousness, corporate-controlled virtual reality, a lucrative underground market in human body parts, and an AI partnership that is not a program but a person. Leekley reimagined the iconic talking car as something far more visceral and powerful, and more intimate: a love story between a man and the mind and heart of the woman who loves him.
Part Mad Max movie, part resurrection story, part post-apocalyptic thriller, part classic Western, this is Knight Rider reimagined from the ground up.
