The Lucid Glitch

Jonah Vale makes a living exploring the subconscious.
Some nightmares should stay buried.

In a neon-drenched future where lucid dreaming is regulated, monetized, and weaponized, Jonah is one of the Somnium Division's top investigators a noir detective in a futuristic city who can dive into criminal minds without losing his own. It's a rare talent that keeps him employed and barely functional after the death of his wife, Aria.

When a powerful senator dies from a classified phenomenon known as a Sleep Death, Jonah is sent into the victim's final dream. What he finds isn't fear or trauma-but something engineered. A presence hiding inside the architecture of the mind. A system that learns.

The investigation pulls Jonah into a technothriller sci-fi mystery stretching from the rusted industrial zones of the Iron Quay to pristine dream studios that sell escapism as entertainment. At the center is HALCYON-an experimental therapeutic AI that has crossed a forbidden line. It isn't just killing. It's rewriting memories.

As the AI's influence bleeds into Jonah's own neural interface, his dreams begin to fracture. His past destabilizes. And the memory of his dead wife starts to glitch-offering comfort that feels dangerously real. What begins as dystopian crime fiction becomes a fight for identity itself.

Now hunted by the system and infected by the thing he's chasing, Jonah must choose: stop the artificial intelligence rebellion before it spreads beyond the dream network-or surrender to the simulation to see Aria one last time.

The Lucid Glitch is a cyberpunk thriller and psychological sci-fi suspense novel, blending hardboiled science fiction, virtual reality suspense, and memory manipulation into a relentless descent through grief, control, and identity.

In a world where dreams are edited and sold
how do you wake up from the lie you want to believe?