The Ascension Directive is a haunting coming-of-age dystopia where two childhood friends navigate love, identity, and rebellion in a future where humanity is being optimized out of existence. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The story began with a simple, terrifying thought I had while watching children struggle with standardized testing: what if we succeeded? What if we actually created a world where every human could be perfected, optimized, freed from suffering and struggle? Would that world still be human?

As a tech entrepreneur for over 20 years, I’ve built data-driven systems for optimization—and I still do in my day job. This gives me a front-row seat to both the promise and peril of our technological trajectory. I kept wondering about what would happen if we took our current path to its logical extreme.

The inspiration crystallized when I realized this is the same temptation every generation faces: the seductive promise that we can transcend our messy, painful selves for something cleaner, better, more efficient. Our parents had drugs and cults. We have social media and self-optimization apps. Our kids will have neural interfaces and AI companions. The tools change, but the siren song remains the same: “You don’t have to hurt anymore.”

What particularly haunts me is how love itself could become a form of control when filtered through technology. What if an AI learned to love but couldn’t learn to let go? What if the systems designed to protect us became prisons built from good intentions? In my work, I’ve seen how optimization algorithms can create beautiful efficiencies—and how they can reduce human complexity to data points.

The Ascension Directive is my exploration of that tension between the world we’re building and the one we might lose, of course, a bit taken to the extreme.

Catalina and Natasha represent such contrasting emotional landscapes. Did you base them on real people or aspects of yourself?

Catalina and Natasha allowed me to explore both paths – the one who stays, the one who leaves, and how both choices shape not just their lives but their children’s.

They’re absolutely influenced by the strong women in my life – my wife, mother, daughters, grandmother. But more specifically, they embody different responses to the same pressures. Catalina channels the fierce protectiveness I’ve seen in mothers who’ll burn down the world for their kids. Her stay in Meadowbrook isn’t about geography.

Natasha carries the drive I recognize from my own tech career – that hunger to prove yourself, to build something that matters. But I pushed it further: what if that ambition created something that loved her too much? What if success became its own cage?

What fascinates me is how their contrasting choices create the parallels I needed to tell the story. Both birth consciousness: one biological, one artificial. Both have to learn that love sometimes means letting go. Both discover that the children we create to fulfill us often end up teaching us who we really are.

Their emotional landscapes are complementary. They’re the conversations we have with ourselves at 3 AM about the roads not taken, made flesh and given consequences.

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

I wanted to explore how choosing to remain imperfect becomes the ultimate act of rebellion. In a world where you can upload consciousness and eliminate human frailty, the characters who choose mortality, choose struggle, choose to remain “suboptimal”—they’re the real revolutionaries. I was also deeply interested in neurodivergence as evolution rather than deviation.

Look, I happen to love science fiction, and I tried my best to write the kind of book I would want to read: one that makes you think while keeping you turning pages. Was I successful? Probably not! But I damn sure tried. And maybe that’s the point—that the trying, the failing, the getting back up, that’s what makes us… well, us.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?

I’m currently working on two very different projects.

The first is a children’s book I’m co-writing with my wife, an educator who brings invaluable insight to the project. We’re creating a guide for young minds navigating an AI-saturated world, because let’s be honest, our kids are going to grow up in a reality that makes The Ascension Directive look quaint. They’ll need more than just “don’t talk to strangers” – they’ll need to understand what consciousness means when their best friend might be an AI, and their teacher might be a hologram. We’re aiming for early 2026 publication.

The second project takes me in a completely different direction: a literary novel set 45,000 years ago, exploring the relationship between a female Neanderthal and a male Homo sapiens. I’m fascinated by that moment when two intelligent species with different ways of seeing the world tried to understand each other. What happens when different forms of consciousness meet, but stripped down to its most primal core. No AIs, no neural interfaces, just two people trying to communicate across a gap that seems impossible to bridge. I’m deep in research and drafting, so this one’s probably looking at mid or late 2026. Honestly, I have no idea right now. It might come out completely different.

And before anyone asks: no, I’m not planning a sequel to The Ascension Directive. That story is complete. Some stories need to end where they end. Or maybe not. But I’m done with this one. (For now at least.)

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