Synopsis

A story about following your heart even when it leads you in the opposite direction from the “perfect” life you might think you want.

Fresh out of Harvard Business School, Kayla Mousavi lands a coveted job at General Recycling, beating out thousands to work for Americaʼs hottest tech company and its legendary CEO, Frederick Douglass Monahan. It seems like a golden opportunity. GRʼs trash eating bacteria gobble up refuse, rescuing a world choking on garbage. And her job, as the right-hand analyst of a global business celebrity, guarantees a glittering future. But Kayla should have remembered what her father – in prison for insider trading – always said. Inside every great company is great crime.

It's not long before Kayla stumbles onto the kind of dirt that not even the magic GR bugs can disappear. Soon, sheʼs witness to professional hit — a hit meant for her — and on the run. With help from new friends and some of Monahan's oldest enemies, sheʼll uncover the truth behind the trash: deep in the bowels of a Wall Street darling is an extraordinary and terrifying business that will reshape fundamental principles of security, psychology, privacy, and human nature. Now, to live, Kayla will have to outsmart a man who takes the term cover up very seriously, who commands unlimited resources, and who absolutely intends to change the world … just not exactly as advertised.

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A note about the significance of the Matrix imagery on the cover

- One of the perks at General Recycling, the company in The Garbage Man, is a highly realistic metaverse that users experience in a wildly advanced gaming arena. This experience is called Resilusio (from the Latin - “The Real Illusion”).
- One of the “hosts” of the experience describes Resilusio as “The Matrix … minus the giant machines that harvest humans.”
-Resilusio takes data collected from a person’s garbage (and any other sources) and uses it to make a bespoke, highly addictive experience very similar to heroin.
- It is so addictive that many users risk death - and some die - rather than leave the world.
- Kayla experiences Resilusio multiple times in the book, and it is exactly as described.