Conrad Hellington drifts through his privileged world with the aimless certainty of inherited wealth, until the night masked figures drag him from an upscale party into a nightmare that will reshape everything he believes about reality.
The Hashmalim—black-clad anarchists who speak in riddles about hacked systems and false worlds—hold him for days, stripping away his entitled arrogance through psychological torment. But when no ransom comes, when his own family refuses to pay for his release, they simply abandon him in a dark park with a single, inexplicable command: never have children, or we will find you and kill you.
The experience transforms Conrad from a spoiled drifter into something resembling a decent human being. For the first time, people are drawn to his authenticity rather than repelled by his privilege. When he meets Samira—brilliant, captivating, genuinely in love with the man he's become—Conrad believes he's finally found purpose.
But Samira's questions about his captivity cut too deep, probe too specifically. Her fascination with the details of his imprisonment feels less like concern and more like interrogation. And when she becomes pregnant despite his fears, reality begins to fracture at the edges. Surveillance that shouldn't exist. Objects that appear and disappear. A world that seems increasingly untethered from the laws of physics.
The truth, when it emerges, is more devastating than Conrad could imagine. His entire life has been a lie—a training simulation designed to forge him into the perfect intelligence operative.
On the day of his abduction, he was actually given over to a clandestine service by his father, who perceived him as a spoiled brat. The training program for the service was a simulation, and it is in that simulation he experienced the abduction by the Hashmalim.
But the program has been infiltrated by Al-Muhaakaa, a radical Islamic sect that views all simulation technology as spiritual warfare. They believe the West has weaponized artificiality itself—that every virtual reality, every digital world, every false simulation is a deliberate tool to sever human souls from Allah's authentic creation. To them, America represents the pinnacle of this theological offense: a nation built on manufactured dreams and artificial experiences, now literally imprisoning consciousness in digital prisons disguised as training programs.
Samira herself is both hacker and true believer, sent to infiltrate Conrad's false world with a mission that transcends espionage. According to Al-Muhaakaa doctrine, the souls of their martyrs can be reincarnated through these simulations—and the child she carries is intended to be the rebirth of a dead terrorist, armed with both religious extremism and intimate knowledge of the very systems meant to stop him.
As the boundaries between real and artificial collapse entirely, Conrad discovers he's become an unwitting weapon in a war between competing visions of truth itself—and the child Samira carries may be the most dangerous consciousness ever born into the space between worlds.
A mind-bending thriller about privilege, manipulation, and the terrifying possibility that our deepest beliefs about reality might be nothing more than code.