Early ReTyrement

It’s always the clever fellows who fall back into time, the gleaming-teeth, hair-part guys with a conveniently useful knowledge of metallurgy, lower Nile politics or even the date of the next eclipse.

How handy.

But what is some shmoe (a computer programmer, say) went back? What if this end-use user found himself in 300 BC with nothing save the shirt on his back (and no pants, incidentally*)? What could he do?

What would you do?

Mason Trellis is just this sort of reluctant chrononaut, an everyday guy who finds himself ripped from his glum modern-day corporation and thrust back to the town of Tyre on the Lebanese coast, circa 330BC. After some initial floundering, Mason finds his stride, befuddling the native Phoenicians and their Persian overlords in a number of ways: to wit…

• He charcoals an brand icon all over town, a gorilla marketing campaign which allows him to sell everyday “meh” grains at ten times their price. Sound fantastic? How much did you pay for your Nikes?
• He brings restaurant science to his master’s wineshop: servers in sections, two-for-one drinks, background music, ladies nights, coupons, posted prices. And once this shop takes off, he franchises it up and down the Levant.
• He develops a computer, a handful of colored beads for the whole number, another for the fractions. With scalloped wood tables serving as its “memory”, an abacus for its “processer”, a trireme beat-drummer for its “clock” and procedural scrolls as its “programs”, he achieves formal, methodical processes for accounting, merchant fleet utility, and (when the Persian’s are in a bind) taxation records. His computer is eventually coupled to…
• His super-catapult! Impractical because of its slow speed, Mason uses fire-control ballistic programming from his computer to drop its massive war loads where he wants, when he wants. And this will prove invaluable when Alexander the Great comes a’ calling.

And with all this, the reader also enjoys romances, horse chases, trireme battles, intrigue, revenge, economics, siege warfare and a parrot.

Early ReTyrement: It’s a far funner history than you learned in high school!

* = his blue jeans are the first things stolen from him. The dyes of Tyre do not come cheaply, and the dyes of Levy’s are darn-near identical!

~ SNEEK PEAK AT THE OPENING CHAPTER! ~