Hourglass: Part 4 - The Dictator

This was a game that played you.

The Dictator 3 was impressive, and in every way, it was an evolution of the franchise. One of the revolutionary features of the game was integrating data from your Link and personal life. The permissions the game requested were invasive, to say the least…

The game requests the following permissions:
To use images and memories recorded by your Link from the past 72 hours
Will block other notifications
Would like to access your biosigns and corresponding emotional reactions from the past 72 hours
Will monitor your reactions to external stimuli within 72 hours of playing the game
May stimulate lucid dream content while you are asleep

Xavier barely read them before approving them. Don’t pretend, Dear Reader, that you would be much more judicious about denying permissions when exhilarated by a new install you’re rearing to play.

These games were incredibly focus-intensive; they employed a gamified working memory task so that the game’s challenges took up more of the RAM-like working memory of the conscious mind. Many players consume absurd amounts of caffeine to push the envelope…
Amateurs! I dabble with the Modafinil molecule to augment my gaming skills. It’s like being on three strong cups of coffee for nine hours - minus the twitchiness. If I’m competing and need to bring next-level game, I stack it with a tablespoon or two of MCT oil, which switches your brain to burning ketones instead of carbohydrates. It is tantamount to putting Super Unleaded gasoline instead of dirty cooking oil in the fuel tank of a V8 Mustang before a day at the track. Together, they make you a scary-smart, focused gamer with the reflexes of a cat.

The VR game began with a tour of a massive seafaring vessel, The Neptune, the flagship of the Atlantean navy. An attractive female lieutenant was his guide throughout the vessel as he interacted with an assortment of colorful characters throughout the vessel…
Gruff engineers in the propulsion sector.
Two tobacco-smoking, philosophizing laborers in the torpedo room.
Infantrymen training hand-to-hand combat.
Two drunken sailors who had been locked up for a fight, hurling insults in the brig.
New recruits being brainwashed in a training center.
An infirmary with a drugged-up patient undergoing surgery.
A flight deck crammed with smaller combat craft.
He poked his digital head into several shrines and onboard temples of the Atlantean pantheon, a few doubling as brothels.
His tour also included an impressive map room with one wall covered by a realistically inaccurate map of the globe according to the leading Atlantean cartographers, in the corner two cartographers argued about the existence of Greenland.
The world of The Neptune was a smörgåsbord of modern technology (like torpedoes), ancient implements of warfare (like swords), magic arts of the Atlanteans, and polytheistic religious iconoclasm.

The tour ended in a conference room where Xavier’s character was made responsible for investigating a remote outpost of the Atlantean hegemony that a disaster of epic proportions on the Mediterranean isle of Crete had destroyed.

Far from pictures of the sun-drenched island Xavier had seen in photos, Dictator 3’s Crete was a forlorn place. An island made grey by the ash-covered ground. Massive jagged boulders had been strewn, wrecking palaces and overthrowing stone columns. A wretched rendering of a thriving ancient society destroyed in a few hours by massive geologic forces, sulfur, and fire. The few soot-faced survivors wailed for the dead, begged Xavier for food and help, or wondered about in a state of shell shock, muttering nonsense and laughing diabolically at the morbid scenes of destruction.
His investigations on the island led him to evidence that the eruption was the conspiracy of the rogue Greek state of Argos, which had developed dark arts of magic on a scale massive enough to summon the volcanic wrath of the island.

Upon debriefing the admiralty, he was made the commander of a squadron of Jules Verne-esque, Man of War aerial battleships with hot air balloons for sails. The obvious weakness of these visually impressive, fictional vessels of warfare was the highly flammable balloons that provided the lift. If a single flaming arrow struck them, the ships would fall out of the sky like rocks.

His mission was to punish the errant state for their subterfuge, beginning with an attack on the Temple of Dragos. The columns and classically Greek architecture of the target emerged out of the mist on the side of a rugged mountain that overlooked the city of Argos. Xavier ordered the flotilla of airships to surround the temple and pound it into rubble with their short-ranged, powerful cannons. But as the first airship moved into position, three darts of flame were fired from behind the temple into its balloons.
The temple was protected by an artillery unit of archers and two massive bolt-launching crossbows that required multiple men to operate—longer range than the cannons of his aerial battleships, a formidable threat. In a digital moment no doubt inspired by images of The Hindenburg moments before its demise, the flames proliferated and consumed the balloons suspending the vessel in the air. As it lost altitude dramatically, the balloons to the front of the vessel were consumed first by the fire, causing the wooden vessel to dangle like a toy in the air from the aft balloons. Screams of Atlantean sailors plummeting to their deaths could be heard as one-fifth of his command was lost. It violently crash-landed against the steep grade of the mountain.

This would require a change of strategy. He signaled his command to climb, the flotilla of vessels would adopt a dive bombing strategy; building great speed descending rapidly, and firing upon the temple, attacking it in pairs to overwhelm and present moving targets to the artillery unit.
A group of toga-wearing priests ran from the temple, carrying a staff with a large, ornate winged creature perched on it. A volley of arrows from the nearest aerial battleship took down half a dozen of them. Instead of fleeing into the forest below, the surviving priests oddly made their way towards the summit of the mountain. Xavier ignored them and continued the attack on the temple while trying to avoid the flaming arrows and bolts launched by the artillery unit.

A flash appeared from the mountain’s summit. The priests had fired off some kind of signal from the mountaintop. A few minutes later, in a flash of scales, wings, pyrotechnics, claws, and a distortion of serpentine anatomy, a dragon appeared on the deck of his ship. It decapitated a crew member with a razor-sharp, black obsidian claw and spit a fireball that consumed three archers in a matter of seconds. Two brave nearby infantrymen took up spears and began to back the beast into a corner of the deck, in a flurry of wings and claws one of the points of the spears found itself in the dragon’s midsection. Injured and admitting temporary defeat, the dragon dove off the ship’s side and back into the relative safety of the open sky. As its mighty wings grasped the air, it released a terrifying guttural scream.
Moments later, five more dragons filled the sky. Two were huge, like winged Tyrannosaurus Rexes. In a moment fit for a Hollywood blockbuster, one of the aerial leviathans easily dodged the defensive volleys of his fleet, closed in on one of the airships, and ripped the vessel partially apart midair with its massive claws. Two smaller dragons strafed his vessel, blowing missiles of fire and sulfur into the hot air balloons that kept the airship afloat hundreds of feet above the Peloponnesian landscape. As his digital persona fell out of the sky, he could hear air rushing past his ears.
The game prompted him to restart the level. Xavier was proving to be a less-than-masterful dictator, and he was only given two failures of any mission before being demoted to a more simplistic position in the hierarchy of the Atlantean navy.
Damn! If I were to drop a Modafinil, I could multi-task destroying the temple, killing the priests, and fending off the dragon attack… But Modafinil puts me in an antisocial mood, and I’ve got my hot date with Astrid tonight. I could take some MCT oil, which gives me an edge and wears off in about five hours…

Xavier paused the game and ordered a bottle of MCT oil from AmZN Instant; a few minutes later, there was a knock on his door. In an impressive symphony of modern alchemy and logistics, the 3D printer of organic products in his neighborhood had already synthesized the product, bottled it, and drone-delivered a cylinder of pure ketonic stimulant to his building’s concierge.
I really shouldn’t play all day on an empty stomach.
Avocado, in particular, is delicious with MCT oil. So Xavier began to prepare a salad; as he reached for a cutting board, he bumped a satchel he had left on the counter. It fell on the floor, and a single large orange pill rolled out.
The Modafinil. I forgot I had kept some in this backpack. Why not!
Xavier swallowed the Modafinil, chased it with three teaspoons of medium-chain triglyceride-derived oil, left the meal half-made on the kitchen counter, and returned to gaming.
The Greeks didn’t stand a chance.

This time, the priority would be to avoid the dragons being signaled. Xavier delayed the mission until night and dropped off two small units of infantrymen on the mountain’s opposite side. One unit would be responsible for sneaking into the temple and capturing the dragon signaling staff, for which he would take personal responsibility.
A rope ladder was thrown over the side of the airship, on which Xavier and three other elite infantrymen descended to the rugged mountainside below. The rendering of the unfriendly mountain was impressive, down to the asymmetrical boulders, overhangs, and tiny ledges his team needed to edge along - the scant illumination to do so was provided by the moon’s cold light. As they neared their destination, the temple’s silhouette seemed to morph out of the side of the mountain. From the ground, it was an impressively large structure, sitting on a massive yet mostly flat rock shoulder of the mountainside. The lights of the city twinkled in the distance. To avoid tipping off the artillery unit, he would need to infiltrate the temple itself undetected; his strategy for doing so was pretty simple: he would impersonate a priest.

His small unit moved silently through the dark to about 100 yards of the temple. This time, instead of a small artillery unit guarding the temple, several hundred soldiers were encamped. Conveniently, two priests in togas were working by torchlight in the garden behind the temple. An odd thing to do at night…
They grabbed them, pulled them behind some boulders, and threatened to kill the priests if they didn’t tell them where the signaling staff was in the temple. One of the priests was obviously senior to the other in the priesthood of Dragos. The younger priest almost completely refused to talk, his eyes darted everywhere, the older priest was direct and confrontational, but the younger priest finally revealed that it was in an attic above the apprenticeship room.
I need to ensure the secrecy of this mission…
Xavier pulled his second-in-command aside and explained in low tones: “If the priests are missing, it will cause alarm in the temple, and they may signal the dragons some other way. We need the younger priest to assure the rest of the temple everything is fine. Take the older priest to the airship; don’t kill him, yet - question him to see what he knows about the incident on Crete. The younger priest will convince the rest of the temple that his absence is no cause for concern. If I don’t appear with the staff, I may be captured. Come back here and use more force.”
The younger priest has the distinction of being replaceable and likely more gullible. The older priest probably understands that the signaling staff being stolen means impending disaster for the temple.
He ordered the older priest to strip down and give him his toga and addressed the younger priest: “I promise this old man’s life is worth nothing to me. If I, for any reason, believe you’ve warned the battalion guarding your temple, he will become useless to me.”
As he gestured for the two soldiers to take the older priest back to the airship, he added, “Torture him to find out what he knows about the magic used on Crete.”
What! I’m supposed to be acting like a dictator.

Xavier donned the priest’s robes, his digital body’s muscular frame filling out the fabric sown for a slighter figure, and he took a moment to hide a short sword in the folds. “Show me where the signaling staff is,” Xavier ordered the younger priest, gesturing towards the temple.
The interior design of the temple was rich, strange, and rustic. It’s a shame I have to destroy this place! They passed a large double door with an intricate design featuring a carving of two alluring angels kissing. Beside the door was an ornate vase with an assortment of fresh flowers, walking past it the young priest reached with a jerky movement into his satchel, produced a flower, and added it to the ample collection. Odd thing to do while being held hostage!
“Wait… What’s in here?”
The priest responded nervously, “It’s the dwelling of the vestal virgins of the temple.”
Xavier’s curiosity was piqued, “Show me.”

The doors opened to reveal a chamber fit for a goddess. In the corner, a fireplace blazed, illuminating the room with sublime yellow light. On a large, canopied bed surrounded by draping curtains lounged two voluptuous women, wearing (with infinitely more grace) similar togas to the priest. A simultaneous sensation of guilt, desire, and déjà vu made the hairs stand up on the back of Xavier’s neck as he recognized the vestal virgins.

They were Astrid and Alejandra.

This concludes the four sample chapters that I'm releasing publicly.

If you found them provocative, prepare to have your mind blown by the rest of the Hourglass (especially if you find the myth of Atlantis alluring!)

The novel draws a lot of inspiration for its Atlantis subplot from Graham Hancock's work on the epic mystery of an antediluvian civilization.
The personal growth odyssey of our protagonist, a mastermind cybercriminal and Biohacker who becomes entangled with two beautiful Colombian twin sisters, is set in a near-future dystopia that eerily mirrors a world destroyed 12,800 years ago. The journey of our protagonist - as he grasps the most fundamental and pragmatic philosophical question - do we have free will - is contrasted with the question: is human civilization stuck in an inevitable self-destructive cycle?

What to expect from the novel...

• It's kind of going to be a personal transformation guide masquerading as a novel - illustrating the application of some of the edgier Biohacks, lifehacks, and social dynamics hacks - but more sci-fi thriller novel than a self-help book.
• In the story, our protagonist must solve the greatest unsolved mystery in mathematics - the Goldbach Conjecture. To do so, I describe the ultimate Biohacking stack of Smart Drugs, Nootropics, peptides, brainpower-boosting tech, and flowstate induction tools that he uses to make a momentous historical breakthrough. If you faced a monumental brainpower challenge - something that would define your life trajectory and change the world - and had a small fortune to invest in your Biohacking, THIS would be the stack to unleash unequaled brilliance.
• There's a drug, dubiously a Nootropic, that I've NEVER written about before that may make you rich. But it may turn you into a rapacious and voracious psychopathic capitalist. Apparently, a couple of high-profile white-collar criminals have used it. I reveal it in this novel.
• Seduction is a central theme. Many novels I've read feature wildly unrealistic or dry depictions of romance and seduction. Having personally devoted almost a decade of my life to "the art of seduction" (which resulted in a happy 7-year marriage), this novel will deliver the good stuff in that department (and you might learn a thing or two from it, single guys!) But it's not needlessly gratuitous.
• The book has over a hundred footnotes, giving you link rabbit holes and more information about the different Biohacks and lifehacks that drive the story forward.
• I'm spilling some metaphorical ink to ensure that it's a funny book. I dare say it will make you laugh out loud at points!
• "No free will" is a popular modern idea, but it's deeply, fundamentally incorrect. In this book, I'll properly disassemble it for you.
• The best novels tend to be when the author is transposing their most vibrant life experiences on a fictional narrative, think: Ayn Rand contrasting life in the Soviet Union vs New York City. That's what I do in this science fiction novel in lieu of space battles and time-travel tropes.
• Expect it to be about 150,000 words and come in at around 400-500 pages, but it is a thriller - almost every chapter ends with a cliffhanger that is going to keep you guessing - so I don't think it's going to take you three months to get through!

I'm author-banned on Amazon, which excludes me from mainstream success as an author. It's pretty red-pilled and politically incorrect at points - nobody is going to make this into a movie. If I wasn't self-publishing, my editor at the publisher would be telling me to cut some of the best parts. I don't expect selling the digital book + audiobook package for $9 on my online store will be wildly profitable.
So, Hourglass is really what you would call a passion project. I wrote it because I had this epic story gestating in me for a decade now about a man, a troubled genius and Biohacker, who will ultimately learn that the only way to defeat death and capture time is through the beauty of a woman.
It's not for sex addicts. If you're a man with some degree of sexual sovereignty, you'll get a lot more than entertainment out of Hourglass. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have writing it!

You’ll be able to get it as a digital book + audio book package (release: mid-2025) via the Limitless Mindset Store, here

Pre-Order Novel 🛒 Hourglass

You may pre-order it now via the link above and will receive the current (well-edited and formatted) manuscript of 26 chapters, an invitation to the advance readers group, AND through the link above, you may preview an animated AI short film I’ve produced, giving you a provocative glimpse at the world of Hourglass - a world drunk on virtual bliss that mirrors the destruction of an empire 12,800 years ago… 

Please do NOT share the cinematic trailer video (I'm not ready for it to go viral)