Simulacra: RETURN
Book Three of the Simulacra Trilogy
Scott Randolph, while releasing his non-fiction books under Scott Onstott
to clearly distinguish between the two bodies of work.
Read my Artist's Statement.
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What is The Simulacra Trilogy?
Adrian Shaw spent lifetimes mastering the code of the universe. He built cities of light, rewrote the laws of physics, and challenged the gods of the simulation. But when he pulled the plug to stop the Stratum, he didn't just end the war.
He ended history.
Now, Adrian and Mira are awake in a nightmare of their own making: The Paleolithic Era.
The gleaming spires of the city are gone. The digital network is silent. Stripped of their technology, they have been reduced to a primitive state where complex thought is almost impossible and survival is the only objective. They are no longer Architects. They are little more than animals.
But they are not alone in the wilderness.
An old enemy has survived the reset. Bianchi has risen as a brutal God-King, the "Wolf in the Valley," using fear and superstition to enslave the scattered tribes of the new wilderness. While Adrian struggles to light a fire in the mud, Bianchi is building an empire of blood, turning the simulation’s reset into a permanent prison.
To save the future, Adrian must rediscover the deep human past. Guided by a mysterious traveler named Kael, he must access the "Hall of Records" through the only interface left: altered states of consciousness.
With Bianchi’s army marching to exterminate them, Adrian and Mira must attempt an impossible engineering feat. Using only willow saplings, vines, and the ancient chemistry of the earth, they must weave a Tesseract—a geometric anchor for their minds, capable of rotating their consciousness out of the 3D prison of their own making.
It is a race against time and a hellbent warlord who wants to be God.
From the mud of the Stone Age to the blinding truth of Base Reality, Simulacra: RETURN is the mind-bending non-dual conclusion to the trilogy.
The game is over. It’s time to wake up.
PERFECT FOR FANS OF BLAKE CROUCH, TED CHIANG, AND NEAL STEPHENSON.
My Commitment to Augmented Craftsmanship
My journey with technology is not just professional; it is lifelong and deeply personal. As detailed in The Unlikely Cartographer, I have spent more than five decades walking on artificial legs—a hands-on process of adapting to and mastering constantly evolving technologies. This experience didn't grant me an automatic advantage; it forged a relentless work ethic and a unique intuition and facility to adapt to complex systems. It is this combination of lived experience and decades of dedicated adaptive effort that allowed me to master and teach some of the most complex design software on the planet to architects and engineers for 25 years.
It was a natural evolution to bring this same deep-tech focus to my creative work. My use of AI is not a casual dalliance with a single tool; it is a custom-built ecosystem. It involves a deep and iterative dialogue with Large Language Models, hands-on work with diffusion models for art, building custom pipelines, and leveraging bleeding-edge tools for everything from research to translation. To be precise with the metaphor...
I am the composer. The AI is my orchestra.
Every book is human-directed and human-edited
for voice, coherence, and originality.
This is human-authored art, elevated.
This is augmented craftsmanship.
—Scott Randolph Onstott
The Simulacra Trilogy
Scott Randolph considers The Simulacra Trilogy to be a vital exploration of the modern condition—a narrative experiment designed to test the boundaries between human agency, artificial intelligence, and the enduring power of human connection.
Set in a near-future that feels terrifyingly imminent, the trilogy follows Adrian Shaw, a brilliant analyst who discovers a "backdoor" in the laws of probability. But Adrian does not ascend alone. As he transforms from a quiet observer into the "Sun King"—an architect of history who edits timelines to optimize civilization—he builds a new social order around him. At its center are Mira, the computational biologist who anchors his humanity, and the "Court," an elite inner circle of brilliant women who become the gatekeepers of his new reality.
What begins as a high-stakes financial thriller quickly spirals into a complex drama about power and loyalty. As Adrian reshapes the world, the trilogy asks: What happens to love when reality itself can be edited?
The saga culminates in Simulacra: RETURN, where the ultimate price of perfection is paid. The system crashes, casting Adrian, Mira, and their young family out of their technological utopia and into a brutal, prehistoric "Stone Age" reset. Stripped of language, intellect, and the protection of the Court, they face the "Heavy Tongue." Now, survival depends not on Adrian’s code, but on their collective strength as a family. Guided by the wandering traveler Kael, they must rediscover the "source code" of existence through the sacred geometry of the natural world.
The Simulacra Trilogy merges the razor-sharp tension of a techno-thriller with the mind-bending scope of metaphysical science fiction. It draws on concepts from quantum mechanics and the Eleusinian mysteries, yet remains a deeply personal story. It is a journey from the desire to control the simulation to the ultimate realization that the simulation is a mirror—and that the only way to wake up is to do it together.
