Pitch:

When ex-con programmer Flynn McPherson lands a gig working for Confection, the world’s biggest social media company, it’s the shot he’s always wanted. But inside he discovers their virtual reality network is mining more than just advertising data. Stopping them could cost Flynn his job … and maybe his life.

Excerpt:

Flynn McPherson loved his mother—of course, he did—but life with Mom came with such a high volume of questions that, mathematically, a few had to die in the ether without a response.

“Is it raining?” Mom asked. “If it’s still raining, I might go crazy, baby. Can you check for me, just out the window?” Her mumbling turned a lazy corner to song as she rested her head against the couch. The TV blared nonsense across the clutter of their apartment’s main room, the space they’d just started calling “the room” a few years back.

“I’m sure it’s raining.” Flynn didn’t bother to look, snaking his feet into his boots while pulling his free arm past the torn lining of his jacket’s sleeve. He leaned over the card-table-turned-desk and wiped a fresh sprinkle of crumbs off his laptop’s keyboard. Tabbing past a code-filled command line window still busy running his go-to network penetration script, he triple-checked the bus timetable. “Where the hell is Maggie?”

He turned to the window, wiping the fog away, his face less than an inch from the rain trickling down the other side of the glass. He squinted out into the courtyard looking for good news, looking for a sweet slice of salvation in the dark, looking for Maggie, a five-foot-four nurse as wide as she was tall with a thick accent and a worn leather bag under her arm. Looking for a lot of things, but not for rain.