Summary | A Dystopian Thriller

In LA Prime, sleep is mandatory—engineered and enforced by CapCore Technologies. A single pill guarantees eight hours of dreamless unconsciousness. No dreams. No recovery. No escape.

Vince Cross is a memory jumper—one of the few people willing to use an illegal drug called fryzamine to dive into other people’s memories. He retrieves lost moments for desperate clients: first loves, final goodbyes, and fragments of lives erased by synthetic sleep. Every jump steals years from his body, and staying under too long means never waking up.

As corporate control tightens and resistance begins to surface, Vince uncovers a truth buried deep in the past—one that threatens a world built on forced sleep and forgotten dreams.

A dystopian science fiction thriller about memory, control, and the cost of feeling, perfect for readers of Hugh Howey, cyberpunk fiction, and high-concept science fiction.

Vince Cross stared at the small green pill in his hand, a red lemniscate—the insignia of Capsera Core Technologies—glinting in the light of his narrow pod. Thirty-six years old and still taking jumps. He didn’t know if that made him brave or reckless, but for jumpers like him that line had blurred a long time ago.

Most days it was the same dream: a lost treasure, a lost friend, a secret or a feeling. Love usually, but sometimes regret or some scrap of happiness left to rot. Something bone-deep that couldn't really be lost in the first place. The people who sought him out were desperate to feel something they’d forgotten, and they paid well for discretion.

“You ready?” Vince asked, not impatient but already weighing the cost of this jump in time. Two hours? Three? He guessed the latter, and three hours under was like nine on his body. Time moved differently down there.

“Almost.”

While the Seller shifted around to get comfortable, Vince glanced out the window of his cramped pod. Outside, LA Prime stretched ugly in every direction, somehow being at once a city in constant motion and endless sleep. The horizon was a jagged line of steel and brightly lit spires, reaching up like the fingers of some long-dead crow clawing for the sky. Beyond that, only sea, built on and outward as far as you could look.

Author Bio: L. Ditner

"Time is the most valuable thing we can spend." — Theophrastus

Lambert studied creative writing and graphic design at Canterbury High School and Concordia University. After graduating, he left the literary world behind for the islands of Okinawa, Japan—an experience that shaped his love of atmosphere, isolation, and quiet tension.

Nearly two decades later, he returned to writing to give form to the stories that had been waiting. What began as a single novel quickly grew into a trilogy, driven by questions about memory, control, and the cost of time.

He lives in Canada, and still keeps a notebook by his bedside—just in case a dream slips through.