Manick Graves, Defense Contractor: A Descent into the Depths of the Military Industrial Complex (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798268426076)

"I'm paid to fail. Failure is important."

As a survivability engineer, Dr. Nicholas "Manick" Graves is paid by the Pentagon to fail faster than America's enemies can notice. But when his flagship program implodes amid a career defined by cancellations and bureaucratic warfare, he finds his sanity depends on a precarious bond with his resilient, irreverent colleague, Sidney Lara, even as his marriage crumbles and his only true ally becomes his increasingly distant seventeen-year-old daughter, Zoe.

After his failure leads to exile on a remote Pacific atoll, Manick is drafted into Universe 24: a surreal experiment run by the eccentric tech billionaire Ian Mast to ensure America's supremacy for the next million years. To escape this fever dream and reconnect with the daughter he's nearly lost, he must confront the wreckage of his life and find meaning in a world where his mere existence is unacknowledged