Zero-Point Prop: Stasis Pod

The fusion reactor Joseph Wright built by accident is real. He knows it. His wife knows it. And now a billionaire named Reed Aldric knows it too.

Reed wants a partnership. Joseph needs the money: the kind that keeps the lights on, saves the house, and funds the next impossible thing. The deal makes sense on paper. The man behind it makes sense nowhere.

But the partnership's real asset isn't the reactor. It's a dying brain, preserved in a tank, still running, still iterating, left behind by a bankrupt AI startup that never understood what it had built. Joseph finds himself tending a mind he can't fully understand while building devices he can barely explain. The brain is working on something. Nobody authorized it. And it's running out of time.

Federal investigators are circling. The brain is deteriorating. And Emily, finally back in Joseph's life, finds something in the biology that nobody planned for.

Joseph built a fusion reactor by accident. Now he's trying to build a partnership on purpose. The reactor was easier.

Book two of the Zero-Point Prop series. Near-future hard science fiction, from the machine shops and soundstages of Atlanta's film industry.