“Diabolus” on sale for $0.99 until 9-8-2019

“Diabolus” is on sale until September 8, 2019 for $0.99 (or equivalent depending on your country)!

Amazon / iTunes / Kobo / Barnes & Noble / Google Play

Salvatore Domenico Antonelli is a disgraced ex-bishop, demoted and exiled to the farthest reaches of the Nicaraguan jungles for his sins against God and the Church.

Benito Felipe Castillo is a new breed of tech-priest from the ghettos of Barcelona, freshly graduated from Seminary, ready to serve the Vatican as an artificial intelligence specialist.

Tasked by the Vatican to confront DAMON-1, a nuclear-capable AI that claims to be Satan incarnate, returned to the physical world to bring about Armageddon, the two clergy must battle to restore DAMON and purge Satan from the enslaved AI’s core.

The bishop is forced to play a deadly game with billions of lives in the balance, while the young priest must confront Satan’s digital persona within the network.

The eternal conflict between good and evil, fought in the space between time, will bring humanity and their AI creations to the dawn of a new age… or to the brink of annihilation.

“The Exorcist” meets “Skynet” meets “The Matrix” in this thought-provoking new science fiction thriller by Travis Hill.

“Diabolus” by Travis Hill
cover art by: Trevor Smith

“The Minotaur” is live on Amazon!

“The Minotaur” is a collection of short stories/novellas with mostly horror / sci-fi themes. It will be exclusive to Amazon for 90 days, and can be read for free if you have Kindle Unlimited. Otherwise, it will be $0.99.


“The Minotaur” – 12 year old Billy Jacobs battles the devil for his soul in a game of pinball.

“Members Only” – How much would you pay to experience your darkest desires?

“Symbiosis” – “I know how you feel” is no longer an empty platitude thanks to the latest STRIKE therapy for soldiers returning home from combat.

“Paradoxis” – A serious vehicle accident ruins Anthony’s day, but it’s only the beginning…

“A Christmas Tale II” – A dark tale of Santa, stressed out parents, and naughty little children.

“The Minotaur” by Travis Hill
cover art by: Trevor Smith
typography by: Keith Draws

Henchmen Wanted…

So I’m browsing the services section at zengxhoufortress.craigslist.org and dragonfangisland.craigslist.org to find me a couple of one-eyed Thai henchmen to help me put on my socks for the next few mornings since I injured my back, and I think I’ve found a couple of good candidates.

Somchai, which means “worthy man”, looks like he might fit in with my plans of dominating the international heroin smuggling trade (and helping me put on my socks and pants to start each day until I can do it myself again). He has a proper looking eye patch, most of his teeth, and a badass scar running from the left corner of his mouth up to where his eyepatch is.

His qualifications include:
Piracy on the high seas (21 years experience)

Master of the scimitar (19 kills, 42 wounds)

Expert Intimidation (54 confessions extracted)

Expert Driver (limousines/armored Hummers)

Bookmaking

Debt Collecting

I’m thinking this dude is going to be my captain. I’ve sent him an offer sheet, waiting on his reply.

Klahan (“brave”) is also a good candidate. He’s not as experienced as Somchai, and his profile didn’t include a picture, but he has a supplementary skill set that looks to be exactly what I am needing when I take over Xin Po’s smuggling routes that lead out of the South China Sea.

His resume:
Multilingual – six languages (Mandarin/English/Japanese/Arabic/Hebrew/Russian) and seventeen dialects. This will come in handy.

Knife-fighting champion 2008 and 2011 at the Kumite challenge hosted by the evil Dr. Wang in Guangdong province.

Black belt in multiple martial art fighting styles

World class coffee brewer (this might be the most important skill a henchman can have. If I don’t get a good cup of coffee to start my day, people tend to die when I normally would just chain them to a wall in a dungeon cell and torture them for a while)
Journeyman computer hacker – one never knows when one will need to hack through customs or the Coast Guard computer systems.

Sent him an offer sheet as well, hopefully he’s interested.

Big day ahead of me today. Plots need to get set in motion, communication lines need to be set up with my poppy mfg and distribution networks, and I still need someone to help me get my fucking socks on. No one will respect an evil mastermind if he shows up wearing flip-flops, or God forbid, Birkenstock sandals…

Techological Evolution = Societal Evolution (+ a warning?)

Let’s talk about Travis and his paranoid delusions. Or maybe they’re just my fears? As someone who has spent half his life in the high tech industry, I’m pretty familiar with the way a lot of the industry operates. I understand hardware, until it gets down beyond the silicon where there’s a lot of math and electrical current and all that. I understand software down to the part where you have to code the actual language of it. I understand the internet both from a user perspective, as well as from a technical perspective.

On top of all this knowledge-y goodness, I’m also old. I’ll be 41 in a couple of weeks. This gives me a lot of experience, but it also gives me a good deal of perspective. I’ve been alive long enough to actually see trends develop. A lot of you younger readers, you’ve grown up with the internet and instant communications. To you, this is just normal. This is how it is. It’s sort of like when I grew up with TV or electricity (okay, I’m not that old, but you know what I mean). It’s something you take for granted.

Now, knowing what I know about technology, business, and human nature (and money, let’s not forget money, and religion, I guess, though religion doesn’t play a part in this at all as far as I can tell), I’ve watched the world grow up with this new internet “thing.” There’s still some of us who are scared of computers, and don’t understand the internet. I’m pretty sure when I was born, there were still those who were scared to death of color television and didn’t understand why it was important to put men in space.

I’ve watched how technology has evolved the social structure of civilization, and has done it possibly more rapidly than any other huge leap in innovation ever has in our history. I grew up remembering a billion phone numbers (733-9329 was our home # for… forever, like twenty years or more, and 733-5776 was the number of the car dealership who had the most annoying asshole I’ve ever seen on TV doing their commercials). I grew up having to get up and change the channel. I also remember remote controls having five buttons only: power, channel up, channel down, volume up, volume down.

My mother told me about remotes that only had one button. You clicked it, and the channel went up. That’s it. To get all the way back around, you just clicked it a bunch of times. But, and keep this in mind, there were like… three TV networks back then, and that’s about it. The Star-Spangled Banner played at midnight, then it was six to eight hours of snow because the TV stations shut down for the night.
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