The Simulacra Trilogy: The Complete Series (Cheat, Branch, Return) (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798261772491)

Three Novels. One Infinite Loop. The Ultimate Awakening.

The complete saga is available in a single, massive omnibus. Spanning over 700 pages, this is the story of a "backdoor" in the universe, the human who found it, and the realities that shattered and reformed under their changes to the simulacra.

Adrian Shaw has a secret. He cheats at reality. On paper, he's a brilliant but unremarkable AI scientist and hedge fund quant. Off the books, he's discovered a hidden "backdoor" in the universe that lets him nudge probability and rewrite outcomes. At first, it's harmless-fixing the bugs in his own life. But every edit leaves a fingerprint. As Adrian turns his life into an unsanctioned experiment on eight billion people, he attracts the attention of a ruthless hedge-fund prodigy and a shadowy collective hunting the anomaly. As markets buckle and global stability collapses, Adrian must answer a question the math can't settle: If you really can cheat at reality, where does your responsibility end?

Adrian Shaw broke the rules of reality once. Now he's rewriting them at scale. From a secluded fortress of modernity, Adrian rules as a benevolent "Sun King," engineering a golden timeline of peace at the expense of the edges. Supported by his "Court"-a formidable inner circle of brilliant women-he prunes away tragedies before they happen. But the simulation is fracturing. A ruthless cartel, the Stratum, is "fracking" the timeline for profit, and the "Null State" is eating the boundaries of the world. Adrian faces an impossible choice: keep pruning and become the quietest mass murderer in history, or let the branches run wild and risk a chaos no one can contain.

The system has crashed. As a failsafe, the operating system has reset humanity to the Stone Age. They wake up in a nightmare of their own making: The Paleolithic Era. Stripped of technology and reduced to a primitive state, Adrian, Mira, Elena, and their children must survive a brutal wilderness and a rival tribe led by an old enemy who has crowned himself the "Bone King." But survival is only the beginning. To escape the mud, they must rediscover the code of the universe in the patterns of nature. From the ashes of the Stone Age, they rise to build a new branch of reality in New Pacifica-a dazzling "Golden Age" utopia of high technology and spiritual wisdom. Yet even in paradise, the Gnostic cage remains. To truly be free, Adrian and Mira must make the ultimate choice: remain as Gods in the perfect civilization they synthesized from humanity's forgotten cycles of deep history, or rotate their consciousness out of the simulation entirely and wake up to the blinding, non-dual truth of Base Reality.

The game is over. It's time to wake up.

PERFECT FOR FANS OF BLAKE CROUCH, TED CHIANG, AND NEAL STEPHENSON.