Are we living in a simulation? That's a question Dax Sky would often asked himself. Not very surprising given he designs simulations for a living, creating alternate realities indistinguishable from the real world.
It is the 24th century and Dax lives in the former United States of America, ruled by China. He works for a government agency called SISAR that creates alternate reality simulations of the past and future. His wife, Mae, is a mechanical engineer working for Photonviz Corporation, a company that builds devices located throughout the solar system that collect photons emitted from Earth. The photons are reflected back from deep space and record every event in Earth's history. SISAR uses the photon data to create the historical simulations used as the basis for its alternate history simulations.
But Dax's life is torn apart when he returns from an expedition to the ruins of eastern North America to discover Mae, missing. Taken from his world by a man who looks like him.
But before he can even try to find her, Dax must learn the purpose of a pair of mysterious, alien-like objects whose origin trace back to the time of Christ's birth. The objects belonged to a strange magus who saved the infant Christ from being murdered by the Romans in the Slaughter of the Innocents. They were eventually discovered by archeologists in Costa Rica in the 21st century, and may be connected to a simulation Dax created-a world inexplicably entwined with his own reality.
Unusual circles and markings found in caves created by ancient cultures, and on the ceilings of temples in one of his simulations, may be a celestial calendar predicting some kind of cataclysmic event. An event that will force revelations about not only the existence of the universe but that of life itself.
The Designer spans six thousand years, moving through alternate timelines and histories, all seemingly linked together for a single purpose. Alternate realities that blur the notion that any one reality is the 'true' reality. Illusions created by us.
The novel is both hard science fiction and alternate history fiction, in the tradition of novels written by authors like Philip K. Dick and Blake Crouch, or storylines in movies like Inception and The Matrix series. It also features adventure and mystery like that found in the classic science fiction books written by Jules Verne or H. G. Wells. Readers of Stephen King's novels The Stand and 11/22/63, will find similar themes in The Designer. And fans of the expansive worldbuilding in science fiction novels like Frank Herbert's Dune or the Netflix series, Black Mirror, will appreciate the worldbuilding in The Designer.
The Designer explores the nature of reality and provides answers to the fundamental questions about the universe and human existence posed by scientists and philosophers throughout human history. The novel challenges every bit of accumulated science and religious dogma, creating a new blueprint for existence. Simulation Theory, Multiple Universes, the Block Universe, the strange world of Quantum Mechanics, Existentialism, Monism, Kantianism-these theories and ideas from theoretical and speculative physics, metaphysics and philosophy, are just some of the themes touched on in The Designer. They combine to create that blueprint-the holy grail of scientists for more than a century-The Theory of Everything.
