Artemis One-Zero-Five by Christopher Henderson

My abiding memory of writing Artemis One-Zero-Five is the way the book came to life and refused to behave as I’d planned. One character in particular was always supposed to play a major role in the climax, except the story had other ideas. Meanwhile, somebody I had envisioned as a minor (and expendable) character insisted on coming very much to the fore.

That tends not to happen to me – at least, not to the extent it did with this book. I had no choice but to carry on writing this story, if only to find out how it was going to end!

I am not, as a rule, a ‘pantser’. Although I do accept that the finer details of a writing plan are likely to disintegrate as a book hardens into reality, I prefer to have a reasonable idea of where a plot is going to take me. Writing Artemis One-Zero-Five was, therefore, as exhilarating as it was nerve-wracking for me. Yet somehow the book came together, and it gave me what in retrospect was the only ending the story should ever have had.

As for how the book started, it had its origins in a short story called Europa Union, which I published several years ago. It was in a collection of my early stories, which I have since taken out of print because I no longer consider some of those tales good enough to make public. I did like Europa Union, though, and especially its near-future version of space exploration and exploitation.

In both that original story and Artemis One-Zero-Five, a minority of individuals are able to use a technology known as the Link. This allows them to embed their consciousness in a remote robotic body. Nobody (not even its creator) is entirely certain how the Link works, other than that it uses a phenomenon Albert Einstein once derided as ‘spooky action at a distance’. But work it does, and information between a user’s mind and their body/vehicle is communicated instantaneously rather than being limited by the speed of light. This quirk of science lets Link users explore and carry out activities at vast distances from their biological bodies.

In Artemis One-Zero-Five, the technology is being used to open a new ‘Gold Rush’ by mining asteroids more efficiently and safely than would otherwise be possible. All seems to be going well, until a new, unexpected intelligence finds its way into the Link.

I used to play a lot of role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu. I remember the way such gaming exercised and concentrated the imagination, and when I was messing around with ideas for Artemis One-Zero-Five, I liked the concept that this style of gaming was what gave some people their aptitude to use the Link. At the same time, I was thinking about how a disembodied intelligence finding itself in a completely alien environment would need to seek images and concepts with which to make sense of its new reality, and that it would take those images and concepts from the other minds inside the Link. When those two ideas collided, I suddenly had a SF/horror book I knew I needed to write.

Artemis One-Zero-Five also gave a home to Hegarty, a character who had been popping up in abandoned writing projects of mine for around 20 years. I remain fond of Hegarty, but it was a relief finally to let him go. At last, he could go live in other people’s heads instead!

Christopher Henderson was born in Streatham (UK) at the dawn of the 1970s, probably the weirdest decade there has ever been. He has haunted south London ever since.

His first career in writing (under a different name) concentrated on non-fiction, or at least on the shadowy outer edges of fact. Occasional forays into writing fiction garnered him a smattering of local and national awards, but for the most part his articles and books, published both traditionally and independently, specialized in folklore and real-life paranormal experiences.

That person is dead.

In this incarnation, Henderson writes fiction, and especially supernatural horror fiction, in defiance of a country, a world, and a modern era he no longer wishes to acknowledge.

For more details about Christopher Henderson, visit www.christopherhendersonhorror.com or follow @ChendersHorror on Twitter.

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