The Z-Symptom

Humanity has not dreamed for eighteen years. Then eighty thousand people fall asleep and cannot wake, while neurological reconstructions reveal the same persistent city.

Former homicide investigator Elias Vale enters that world through an experimental neural interface, expecting a shared hallucination. Instead he finds rain, blood, a civilization that remembers human dreamers as the Vanishing Ones, and the wife who disappeared eleven years earlier. As the link between worlds destabilizes the systems Earth depends on, Elias must find a way to protect one reality without erasing the other.

The Z-Symptom is a high-concept psychological science-fiction thriller about memory, consciousness, and the cost of calling one world real.

Book One of The Z-Symptom Trilogy, by Yadiel Oquendo. Includes 20 full-page illustrations and 25 smaller artworks.

Created using AI-generated text and illustrations, developed and extensively revised under Yadiel Oquendo’s creative direction.