Michael Angel Livres

Ophelia Banks, a brilliant yet uncredentialed junior-level tester, lies to her supervisor about the purpose of a personal check. The lie escalates from the check to the creation of a fictitious online NGO, to the NGO's presence in a fictitious country with a fictitious population, to the fictitious country's integration with both Yotta.com, the world's largest online corporation, and the Agency facility in Bluffdale, Utah. The fictitious country emerges from the political toil of Kazakhstan, falling ever deeper into the geopolitics and economy of the real world. The online country satisfies the addictive needs for attention, intimacy, social connection, curiosity, greed, power, information, and truth of the characters unknowingly caught in the web of deceit. The forces that fuel the illusion grow beyond Ophelia's ability to control them. When the illusion collapses, it exposes the vulnerability of each character's online addictions, resulting in real and dire consequences for the characters and all of online society.