Stephen Beachy

Gonzalo Vega and the Portal Down Below Stephen Beachy

Gonzalo Vega is on a mission. He needs to cross the border into Mexico with his powerful quantum computer and locate the portal to a mysterious Aztec underground. But he's lost a foot, acquired a chatty virus in his cyborg parts, and his Amish friends have gone missing. On his journey he will hallucinate wildly, revisit the garbage dump of his childhood, hook up with strangers, and descend into deeper and deeper levels of a vast tunnel system where he will come face to face with his greatest fears and the most profound questions about what it means to be alive. Meanwhile, the Amish kids, Leahbelle and Zeke, will nurse their own wounds, struggle with lost memories and violent desires, and search for each other and for Gonzalo. Into a mysterious Virtual Reality role-playing game, through the hallucinatory Liminal Zone, and past the data wall to the other side of the border, with the landscape constantly shifting shapes and nobody they can trust to tell them what is real, the three teens will discover that both love and resistance are as dangerous as hell.