Fifteen-year-old Danny Kessler has one good thing in his dead-end Ohio town: a secondhand computer humming in a bedroom down the hall from his dead brother's closed door. When he gets online for the first time, a game designer with no name reaches out of the dark — warm, brilliant, uncannily interested — and begins handing Danny gifts no one else on Earth could give him. Code that shouldn't run on Danny's machine. Designs years ahead of their time. Stock tips that never miss. Piece by piece, the stranger makes Danny smarter, richer, and untouchable, and Danny rides it out of Mercer toward everything he was never supposed to have. There is only one price: Danny can never ask where the gifts come from. Because the stranger is not at a studio in California. The stranger is Danny — forty years older, used up and alone in a grey corporate tower, who found a glitch in a dead machine that let him reach back down the wire to the last version of himself a person could still love. He tells himself he's saving the boy. What he's actually doing is strip-mining a child's soul to build the empty man he became: spending Danny's friends, his first love, his own honest talent, one transaction at a time, to manufacture the very loneliness he's reaching back from. And the deeper Danny climbs, the more he finds pieces of his own most secret life turning up inside the stranger's games — including a place only he and his dead brother ever knew, rendered as a level, with a message carved at the bottom that no one alive should have been able to leave. When Danny finally understands who is on the other end of the wire, he faces the only choice that was ever really his: take the crown and become the man in the grey room, or break the loop — and give up the one person who ever truly understood him, because that person is himself. VISIONSOFT is a dual-timeline thriller about a dark bargain, for anyone who ever wondered what they'd do if their own future picked up the phone.
