A Mischievous History of Time

After fully expecting to die in deep space, Alex Dan wakes in paradise (according to the travel brochure) and must use weaponized self-help tricks to survive all the chanting, obedience shrouds, and complimentary Kool-Aid, while rescuing a devoted girl calmly preparing for her once-in-a-lifetime mandatory lava dive.

Welcome to paradise. Ignore the screaming.

Humanity didn't die of hunger or war - it died of persuasion. Air was metered, truth was monetised, and your thoughts came pre-approved by a marketing algorithm. Only Mind Arts kept you human.

Alex Dan learned it well. Too well.

When everything he loved was gone, he commandeered a spacecraft to nowhere, fully intending never to arrive.

But life, the infuriatingly persistent thing that it is, had other plans. He opened his eyes not to the void, but to a paradise of ghosts: perfect people, wrapped in white, gliding like synchronised clouds through a civilization that worshipped something called The Power.

The Power provides. The Power protects. The Power lies.

What follows is a love story written with a flamethrower. A darkly comic war of minds, where belief itself is the battlefield and manipulation the native tongue. Along the way, there's a girl (of course there's a girl) terminally ill, terminally curious, and quite possibly the most dangerous person on the planet. Together, they set out to uncover what keeps paradise so obedient. Spoiler: it isn't divine intervention. It's marketing.

Expect hypnosis. Expect stolen robots. Expect plans involving water balloons, moral collapse, and possibly weaponised hugs. Expect the universe to fold in on itself and wink at you for paying attention.

This is not a story about saving the world. It's a story about seeing it clearly for the first time, and deciding what to do with that unbearable knowledge.

And before you go thinking you're immune to manipulation, remember this: this blurb is doing it to you right now.