Synopsis
THE FIRST NOVEL
IN THE ATHERIA
UNIVERSE
The Aperture is a novel set ten years before the events of Atheria.
The story follows Marcus Reyes — a forty-eight-year-old engineer for the Verdigris Water Authority — who, in the autumn of 2031, three years before the global collapse, accepts a federal contract he is not allowed to discuss. He is taken to a small facility outside of a town called Halden, in central Pennsylvania. He meets five other people who have signed similar contracts. He is told, in clinical language, what they are about to do. And then he and the other five descend into a chamber eighteen meters underground, where there is a hole in the air.
The previous people they sent through have not come back.
Marcus, knowing this, decides to go anyway.
The Aperture is a horror novel. It's also a novel about grief. Marcus has lost almost everything a man can lose without dying himself. The program that contacts him understands this, and gives him a chance to be something. The book is about what a program like that does with a man like that.
If you have ever stood at a window after something happened, and looked at a place where something used to be, and tried to make it be there again — The Aperture is for you.