Ivan Teller
Books
Disclosure Books
Alvin Mercer arrives on Mars with a fraying suit, a famous name that means nothing anymore, and the one thing his ruined family couldn't sell: a broken teleporter his grandfather built and never explained. He has a dream of building something — a brokerage, an empire, a fortune pulled out of the freight lanes of the red planet — and a new wife, Jessica, a sharp-eyed Martian who married him anyway and keeps telling him the truth he doesn't want to hear.
What Alvin doesn't understand yet is that he isn't really building any of it to succeed. He's building it to keep from being alone in a quiet room with himself.
Across a hundred years and two planets, Alvin will make and lose fortunes, help save the homeworld humanity nearly threw away, and raise glittering virtual worlds out of nothing — each one a more beautiful place to hide. And the one person who keeps following him to the edge of every fortress to pull him back may be the one he understands least of all.
A sweeping, intimate work of literary science fiction about ambition and emptiness, the worlds we build to avoid ourselves, and the hardest thing a restless soul ever has to learn: how to sit still in the dark and simply be alive.
Dylan thought making the best pizza in the city was enough. Then a bleeding alien warrior turned up in his alley, a soulless buffet opened across the street, and the whole hidden universe came pouring through the cracks. Now a humble pizza maker, a gentle giant, and a fifty-year-old man with a good oven stand between one ordinary corner and the ancient dark that's come to swallow it. The fate of the block — and maybe a great deal more — comes down to a single question: when everything tells you to give up and cash out, can you still choose to keep the lid open?
By every measure that mattered to the people who made him, Brak was a success. A body with an implant. A walking vault that could be searched, scanned, and shot at without ever giving up what was buried deepest inside it. For years he carried the most precious data of a collapsing world across sealed borders on foot — money, identities, coordinates, the lives of people on the run — until the implant had been written and overwritten so many times that his own self became just one more corrupted file in the stack.
The Cube
By every measure, Fritz Arrington has won. The luxury apartment in Urban City. The loving family. The job that pays for all of it — the one he isn't allowed to talk about, because he genuinely cannot remember a single day of it.What he can't remember is the Cube. A windowless black monolith that should not exist anywhere, it appears and vanishes across deserts and oceans and centuries, and Fritz is the only living hand that fits its key. He runs it. He repairs it. And when it requires people to disappear — refugees in a war zone, a stranger with a name he'll never learn, an entire forgotten chapter of the world — his hands do the work and the machine takes the memory, gently, before sending him home to a wife whose name is subtly wrong.Then the seals begin to slip. Fritz remembers. And once he can't stop remembering, he discovers what the Cube really is: not a weapon but a binding element — the nail that pins humanity to a kept, comfortable, manufactured reality, run by caretakers who harvest souls like fuel and bet, every single day, that no one will ever try to leave. They almost always win. Almost.
Aton V
Anton wakes on a dead red plain with half his mind gone and no idea who he is. A small grey robot dog stands over him, patient as the dust, holding a single tablet in its jaw. Good morning. You have one item of correspondence. Delivery is logged.The correspondence is a warrant. It bears his own name — Anton V, unit five of five — and it charges him with nothing less than the end of the world.As each day's dispatch peels back another layer, Anton recovers a hundred centuries of buried memory: a laboratory dug down toward the Earth's molten heart, where his team found a people who were not quite people — advanced, gentle, hollowed out, calling themselves the Three. A reincarnation engine fused to a machine that folds time. A wife he stole across the ages and learned, too late, to love. A golden civilization drowned at the dawn of history and dragged screaming back into the light. And, beneath all of it, a single unbearable question he has spent every life refusing to answer: why, when he has sworn over and over to end suffering, does he reach every single time for the knife?
Dead Signal
April 12, 2047. The telepathy grid that binds three hundred million minds across New Chicago dies in a shower of sparks — and Peter, a former relief-corps medic, has no idea he's just watched the world end.The collapse wasn't an accident. It was the first move in a conspiracy decades deep. Severed from the global network, nuclear reactors begin to fail one by one, the oceans rise to swallow whole continents, and the only intact civilization left on Earth glows on the African coast — a coalition of dome cities running on technology no human invented.Because the aliens who visited Earth left more than ruins. They left instructions: clean energy, self-healing climate, a path back from the brink. A gift to a drowning species.Peter and the people he meets along the way — Megan, who built the relay that could free the world; Wendy, whose mind becomes a weapon she never agreed to be; Blair, an android learning the most dangerous thing a machine can learn — will cross a flooded planet and reach all the way to Mars to understand what was really left behind.But the gift was never a gift. It was infrastructure. And what the aliens came to harvest was the one resource a saved world produces in abundance — the one thing they never imagined a species could learn to aim.They came for what we felt. We gave them more than they could hold.A story about power, scarcity, compassion, and what it costs to rebuild from the floor — Dead Signal asks whether the thing that makes us worth saving is also the thing that makes us prey.
© Ivan Teller. All rights reserved.