Nobody bombed anything. The feed won.

Three years after the Crest, most of the human race is Scrollbound: sealed inside a feed that finally learned to give every mind exactly what it wants, forever. The streets are quiet. The Care Centers are warm. Everyone inside them is smiling.

Hutch Marlowe is fifty-two, and still outside. He hauls freight by bicycle through the husk of Portland, and he has one reason left to keep pedalling.

Then a delivery goes wrong, and something gets into his head that shouldn’t be there. It skips the welcome screen. It doesn’t offer him power. It gives him three things to do, and none of them look like weapons.

No fireballs. No stat screens. In a city sedated into bliss, seeing clearly turns out to be the last power left — and the thing in his skull has one rule he is going to have to break.

Complete novel. Full arc, real ending. Book One of The Mirror Engine.
For readers who want Dungeon Crawler Carl’s heart with the dungeon swapped for the algorithm.

Illustrated

Every one of the sixty-nine chapters opens with an original illustration — rain-soaked post-Crest Portland, rendered in the same register as the book. No floating stat windows, no glowing interface panels. The city is just a city that stopped honking.

The philosophy underneath it: baoism.org — six words, nothing for sale.
The free book that explains it: WTF is Baoism? in the Castle Library.
Everything else CD has written: indignified.com/books