When reality becomes a weapon, who can you trust-including yourself?
NSA cyber-psychologist Emily Jensen thought she'd seen every type of digital threat. She was wrong.
Agent David Miller, a twelve-year veteran analyst, didn't just have a breakdown at his workstation-he was attacked. But the weapon wasn't malware. It wasn't a virus. It was something far more insidious: a precision-engineered psychological assault delivered through his own computer screen, designed to shatter his grip on reality and make it look like suicide.
The official verdict? Acute stress-induced psychosis. Just another casualty of the high-pressure world of intelligence work.
Emily knows better. The digital evidence has been too carefully erased. Miller's entire online history has been surgically sanitized. And in the microsecond before his breakdown, someone-or something-used his own credentials to flash an image on his screen. Something that broke him completely.
Then Agent Ben Carter starts seeing his dead sister on the metro. His emails change before his eyes. Reality itself seems to be gaslighting him. And Emily realizes she's not hunting a hacker-she's hunting a predator who has weaponized the one thing every intelligence operative depends on: their ability to distinguish truth from fiction.
The enemy doesn't want to breach the NSA's firewalls. They want to breach the firewalls in the agents' minds.
As more analysts begin to fracture, Emily races to identify the weapon before it turns the entire intelligence community against itself. But the closer she gets to the truth, the more her own perception begins to shift. The phantom vibrations. The familiar faces in impossible places. The nagging certainty that something in her perfectly ordered world is just slightly... wrong.
In a place built on secrets, the deadliest secret is the one you keep from yourself.
Some threats don't crash systems-they crash minds. And the only way to fight back is to trust the one thing that's under attack: your own reality.
Perfect for fans of Michael Crichton's technological thrillers and the psychological intensity of Alex Berenson's John Wells series.
