The Pattern Maker follows a former astronaut now working at NASA’s Johnson Space Center whose colleagues claim they were passengers in a driverless SUV accident leading him to investigate more unsettling occurrences. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I have had a fascination with simulation theory for a long time, especially the work of philosophers, such as Rene Descartes and Nick Bostrom, and from watching shows like Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix. I knew I wanted to base a series of novels on this possibility but I needed another story element to cause a high-stakes thriller plot. This introduced the Pattern Maker because of course, there would be someone who would want to take advantage of changing the world to suit their plans. This book opens with how those changes may look to us as they are happening. I also needed some events that were going to make the fact that we live in a simulation believable to the characters.

I found the science in the novel to be well-developed. What kind of research did you do to make sure you got it all right?

I follow a lot of sites and feeds that cover the latest scientific discoveries and thinking, and this information triggers ideas about how I could bring them together in a plausible way. I then build in extra layers to develop the thriller aspect of the book. To ensure that the science I’m using, and the way I’m twisting it, could work, I refer to the work that researchers have kindly shared in formal papers and scientific journals.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

The premise of the whole series is that nature will repair itself, with a strong leaning toward Gaia theory, which suggests that the planet is self-regulating to sustain life. And, the more humans attempt to “fix” things, the worse they get. I also wanted to explore the idea of how rapidly we can now make changes to systems, at massive speeds, that can have such far-reaching impacts to all lifeforms.

Where does the story go in the next book and where do you see it going in the future?

The main plotline of the series is that by accessing and changing the simulation code, the Pattern Maker has introduced the Year 2038 problem. In a simplified nutshell, the year 2038 problem is a bug that may impact the way some computer systems store and represent time values from January 19, 2038, as they will run out of space to store dates. This could cause the computer to malfunction or stop working, or the calculation could overflow causing the system to think the date has looped and is back at the original start date of 1 January 1970, or the system could go into underflow and make the time value negative, and the system would think it was 13 December 1901. When we’re talking about computer systems, this is something that can (and is currently being) addressed. But when it happens to the simulation that we live in and are an integral part of there’s a range of extinction-level outcomes that could occur. To stop any of these disasters, the team attempts to make changes to the code but they need to somehow test their work. Using a new method of quantum time travel, Sam undertakes missions to throw his consciousness forward to the year 2040 to see if they have been successful. But a lot can happen in 18 years – not just to the world but to Sam’s life. And the Pattern Maker didn’t bow out gracefully, leaving a series of cipher blossoms, which bloom within the simulation code at the worst moments.

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