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Published by: Zero Day Books, LLC
Release Date: September 23, 2025
Pages: 353
ASIN: B0FGHNK279

 

What if your dream job became a nightmare without end?

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, she’s witness to a professional hit — a hit meant for her — and on a collision course with the truth behind the trash: deep in the bowels of a Wall Street darling is an extraordinary and terrifying business that will reshape everything we believe about psychology, security, privacy, and human nature. Now, to live, Kayla will have to outsmart a ruthless genius with unlimited resources. A man 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.