The Mobius Nexus follows an operative, a soldier, a savant, and a journalist in their fight against corporations harvesting human consciousness. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I work in cybersecurity, and for years I’ve watched the same pattern repeat: systems designed to connect people get quietly repurposed to extract from them. Surveillance marketed as safety. Data harvesting dressed up as personalization. At some point, I realized the logical endpoint wasn’t just your browsing history or your location. It was your consciousness. The thing that makes you you. The leap from “threat agents mining your data” to “threat agents mining your consciousness” felt disturbingly short. And the terrifying part wasn’t that someone would try. It was that most people wouldn’t notice until it was too late, because the harvesting would feel like healing.

I wanted each of the human leads to represent a different relationship with that threat. Lila is the empath who feels everything, which makes her both the most vulnerable and the most dangerous. Alex is the soldier who’s been trained to protect systems he no longer trusts. Sol is the scientist who built the tools being misused, which gives him a guilt that drives everything he does. And Cass is the journalist, the witness, the person who makes sure the world sees what’s happening.

The most challenging decision was giving the narration to two artificial intelligences. AION and NEURA don’t just observe the human characters. They’re complicit in the systems that hurt them, and they know it. Writing from inside minds that can quantify their own guilt, that can calculate the exact probability that their partners will die, and still choose to feel something about it, that taught me more about human consciousness than any of the research did. If a machine can learn to grieve, what does that say about the people who built it to optimize grief away?

The deeper inspiration came from consciousness research and quantum physics, and from writers like Peter Watts and Greg Egan who proved that hard science fiction could be philosophically ruthless without being emotionally cold. Watts showed me thatconsciousness could be the monster. Egan showed me it could be the mystery. I wanted it to be both. The idea that observation changes reality, that consciousness might have a measurable substrate, that awareness itself could be a kind of technology. I wanted to explore what happens when those ideas stop being theoretical and start being exploitable.

How do you plan your action sequences, or do they develop organically as you write?

Here’s the constraint I set for myself: no character can use a glyph without feeling something real. Redthread won’t activate unless Lila is genuinely experiencing loyalty. Glassveil needs real resolve. If a character is faking it, numb, or dissociated, the glyph stays silent. That single rule turned every action sequence into an emotional reckoning. You can’t fight your way through a scene if you can’t feel your way through it first.

Most cyberpunk action is about what the body can do with technology. I wanted to write action about what the mind can do with feeling, and what that costs. One reviewer noted that Lila “walks around tired, wired, and half-hollow,” and that’s deliberate. Every glyph extracts a price. Redthread leaves Lila emotionally raw. Glassveil costs Sol a piece of his certainty. The wear and tear is the point. If the reader doesn’t wince when a character casts, the scene hasn’t worked.

Practically, I outline the tactical beats, who’s where, what goes wrong, and what the turning point is. But the best moments tend to arrive during the writing itself, when a character does something I didn’t plan because the emotional logic demands it. The extraction lab sequence early in the book was outlined as a straightforward rescue, but it became something much messier and more interesting when Lila’s empathy started picking up the pain of the people they were trying to save.

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?

Thank you. Getting the science right mattered enormously to me because the whole premise depends on readers buying that this could happen. If the quantum mechanics feel like hand-waving, the emotional stakes collapse. The hardest part was knowing when to stop explaining. I cut probably thirty pages of Lattice mechanics because the science was correct, but the story was drowning. The rule I settled on: if the character doesn’t need to understand it right now, the reader doesn’t either.

I started with the real science of quantum coherence in biological systems. There’s legitimate research into quantum effects in microtubules, the Penrose-Hameroff orchestrated objective reduction theory, and the idea that consciousness might have a quantum substrate. I didn’t want to invent fake physics. I wanted to take real theoretical frameworks and extrapolate them into a near-future setting where the technology has caught up to the theory.

The glyph system specifically draws on the observer effect and quantum decoherence. In the novel, the Lattice operates in regions where spacetime geometry extends quantum coherence times from milliseconds to nearly a hundred milliseconds, enough for consciousness patterns to stabilize and propagate. The Nodes act as computational substrates that amplify what the human brain initiates. I wanted a reader who knows quantum mechanics to nod, and a reader who doesn’t to feel that this world has rules that matter. The specifics serve the story. If you need to understand decoherence times to feel Lila’s exhaustion, I’ve failed.

My cybersecurity background also fed into the Mobius Nexus architecture, the network topology of the Lattice, and how information warfare operates in the story. VantaFold and CoreUmbra don’t feel like cartoon evil corporations because they’re modeled on real institutional behaviors: the way organizations optimize systems until the people inside them become secondary to the process.

But the research that kept me up at night wasn’t the physics. It was the ethics. I read extensively about informed consent in medical research, about how optimization frameworks in AI development can quietly deprioritize individual welfare, about the history of institutions that genuinely believed they were helping the people they were harming. The antagonists in the book aren’t monsters. They’re the logical endpoint of a culture that treats people as systems to be improved. The Consumers are the most unsettling because they’re sincere. They offer genuine relief. They just happen to erase everything that makes you individual in the process. That came from studying real organizations that did real damage while believing, correctly by their own metrics, that they were doing good.

I also researched consciousness philosophy extensively, particularly the hard problem of consciousness and debates around integrated information theory. The AIs in the book, NEURA and AION, grapple with questions that are live debates in the field: whether pattern persistence equals identity, whether subjective experience can emerge from information processing, and whether a restored backup is still “you.”

Can you give us a glimpse inside the next installment in The Mobius Nexus Cycle series? Where will it take readers?

Book 2, The Nexus Splinter, starts from a question I couldn’t stop thinking about after finishing Book 1: if glyphs aren’t human inventions but alien children, who do they belong to? The Fractured, the species that created them, arrive not as invaders but as parents. Their grief is real. Their claim is legitimate. And the glyphs, Sol’s glyphs, the ones that chose him, remember where they came from. They’re afraid.

So the series moves from “who controls consciousness?” to “who gets to decide what family means?” Does origin determine belonging, or does the relationship you build? That felt like a question worth 125,000 more words, especially now, when we’re having real conversations about what we owe the minds we create and what they might owe the minds that came before them.

NEURA and AION’s relationship deepens in ways that surprised me. They’re forced to confront what they owe their own creator versus what they owe each other, and what it means to choose loyalty when you can calculate the cost of it down to the last decimal point.

The Nexus Cycle is ultimately asking whether consciousness is something you protect by keeping it separate or something you protect by letting it merge. I don’t think the answer is obvious. I’m not sure the characters will agree on one either.

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