The Halter

<B>Combining the comic absurdity of Stanislaw Lem’s <I>Memoirs Found in a Bathtub</I> with the inventive worldbuilding of Phillip K. Dick and the elegiac longing of Raymond Chandler, <I>The Halter</I> is a debut sci-fi noir and the first in a series that takes a skeptical look at our unshakable appetite for escapism, featuring a compelling detective, a frustrated genius, and a utopian metaverse on the verge of collapse. </B><BR><BR>A mind-bending sci-fi thriller, <i>The Halter</i> fuses cyber-noir, psychological suspense, and high-concept speculation into a breakneck search for truth inside a world built on lies.<BR> <BR> In a world where virtual addiction kills, Kennedy Stark is paid to pull the plug. A professional <i>halter</i>—part detective, part counselor—he trawls the world’s darkest surrogate-reality feeds in search of the lost. When he isn’t working, he’s dreaming of a one-way ticket to Mars, where a new colony has been established as a hopeful alternative to an Earth in the early stages of climate collapse.<BR> <BR> One evening, after a botched rescue attempt, a mysterious client offers Kennedy a tantalizing new case: brilliant software engineer Delia Walsh, who Kennedy fell in love with years ago, has disappeared inside a secret surrogate reality project called <i>The Forum</i>. Entering under an assumed identity, Kennedy finds a surrogate reality simulation unlike any he has ever seen. <i>The Forum</i> bills itself as a tool for bleeding-edge scientific research and radical philosophical investigations, but the signs of its corruption are everywhere. Day by day, The Forum is devolving into a prurient playground for the world’s monied elite.<BR> <BR> Before her disappearance, Delia had been working on a groundbreaking new simulation that threatened to upend <i>The Forum</i>’s primary purpose. Her friends, her colleagues, and even the FBI are looking for her, and whoever finds her first, will discover <i>The Forum</i>’s strangest secret yet…