K

Enter the waking nightmare of a man who simply goes by K. The dream of his life in Boise, Idaho is crashing down around him. As his construction business comes unravelled, he's losing everything he worked for: his house, his life, even his will to keep trying. Good things flee from him. And if that were where the story relented, K might be able to handle the pain. But in fact, the worst part of his crisis centers on things out of his control: his dreams. The horrors of his own subconscious. They come at him unbidden, even in daylight. His mind is a blank sheet; he can't remember anything before about a year ago. He drowns his frustrations in drink, medications, and a dead-end relationship with Essie, a calculating dominatrix whom K wishes he could love.

But then something happens: precognition. And in the wreckage, K's world begins to burn.

Somewhere in the concrete smash that is Los Angeles, special agent Kendra Inman wrestles with her baby: an elegant and sinister machine. It was supposed to work like this: In full view of the public, a nameless agency was going to run experiments with nanotech that allowed the manipulation of human subjects. The most perfect part of it was that the "medication" mimicked a common REM sleep disorder. Plausible deniability. Beautiful. Without consent, the agency's operatives would hack into people through dreams, controlling their thoughts, their actions, their lives.

That was how it was supposed to go.

Inman can't help but wonder if her theories have pushed past the boundary line between real and spiritual... between what can be observed on earth and what horrors in hell might now be loosed. Whatever is happening, subject six eleven is the focal point of this new malevolence. And now that he... K... is caught in the machine that Inman built, what will happen when he's finally pushed too far? When the consequences are too much for him to bear, who's going to pay?

And what identity, more importantly, will be behind it all?