The Nexus Protocol

Book 1 · Coming November 2026

Root Access

The game is deleting the players nobody remembers. He’s a programmer with no friends. Do the math.

Marcus Reed is a senior backend developer from Boston: brilliant, sarcastic, and the guy everybody pages at 2 a.m. and nobody invites to dinner. When a beta test goes wrong, he wakes up on a bench in the Nexus, a game world built out of everyone’s old data: Yelp reviews, stock photos and dead social media profiles. Four thousand people are trapped there with him. Something is stalking them: a faceless gray figure with a loading wheel for a head that moves only when you blink. The people it takes don’t respawn.

Marcus has read the patch notes, and he has worked out the pattern. It only takes the people nobody is thinking about, and he has never let anyone think about him. Now, armed with a one-of-a-kind Debugger class, a sarcastic rubber duck and a party of misfits he swore he didn’t need, Marcus has to exploit every bug, loophole and badly worded clause in the game to reach the system’s root before it decides he’s garbage.

A fast, funny, surprisingly big-hearted LitRPG for fans of Dungeon Crawler Carl, He Who Fights with Monsters and The Completionist Chronicles. Crunchy stats, clever exploits and a snarky System are all built in.

Not released yet. No store link until there is something to link to.

Book 2 · Coming November 2026

Privilege Escalation

Being remembered kept him alive. Now he needs a thousand people to sign for him.

Marcus Reed beat the garbage collector by being impossible to forget. It turns out the system had a patch for that. His deletion ticket is open again, and this time his file says ORPHANED: his session in the real world has been ended from outside, and no number of friends can save a process with no parent. An orphan can only survive one way. Somebody with authority has to adopt him, and nobody in Old Harbor has any.

There is a dusty charter that says a player can be raised to Steward with a thousand vouches. There is also a catch. A vouch only counts from someone you’ve survived a fight with. So Marcus and his party of misfits start dragging strangers through the worst dungeons the Nexus has to offer: a 2000s IT help desk where the mobs are tickets and the boss is the Escalation Queue, a shared drive where Everyone has Full Control, and a locked office guarded by an admin named Gary who has never once said yes.

Meanwhile a tram full of refugees has rolled in from a shard that’s already been “cleaned up,” somebody is forging combat logs in Marcus’s name, and back in Boston, something on his laptop is answering his email and writing to his estranged sister. It’s doing a better job of being her brother than he ever did.

Seven days on the ticket. A thousand signatures. And a Collector that has learned to wait.

Book 2 of The Nexus Protocol: a dark, funny, big-hearted LitRPG about permissions, paperwork and the people who’ll sign for you. Crunchy stats, dungeon crawls, office-hell bosses and a System that cannot lie but will absolutely mislead you.

Not released yet.

Book 3 · Arc I finale · Coming December 2026

Split Brain

The company made a backup of the whole town. Unfortunately, everyone was still in it.

Marcus Reed finally has a home: a house full of misfits, a cook who feeds him whether he’s hungry or not, and a nurse named Dana who says the names of the dead every morning so the system can’t pretend they never existed. Then the company that owns the Nexus fixes “the anomaly” the way companies fix things. It copies Shard 7 and lets the copies sort it out.

Now there are two Old Harbors, laid over each other like a bad photocopy and split by a gray seam that takes pieces of whoever walks into it. Two lighthouses on the hill, their beams drifting a little further apart every night. Two Danas. Two Teos. And on the far side of the seam, wearing his face, a second Marcus who is three weeks behind, entirely reasonable, and every bit as sure he’s the original.

When the beams point in opposite directions, the system will hold a vote, and the copy that loses goes in the trash. The two towns can barely hear each other. Clocks drift, messages lag, and the only way across is over the harbor mud at low tide with a stack of index cards. Marcus has to get two versions of everyone he loves to agree on a single truth before something black and very efficient steps out of the seam to settle it for them.

And in the real world, his sister has just driven fourteen hours to Boston to find his laptop still typing.

Book 3 of The Nexus Protocol and the finale of its first arc: a LitRPG about networks, consensus and who gets to be the real one. Sharp, funny, and not at all kind to your heart.

Not released yet.