One man's dangerous quest to solve the mystery of his forgotten childhood and to save fellow trauma survivors from a fate worse than death.

An A.I. buried in a government black site knows what the desert cult did to Julian's mind when he was seven.

Twenty years later, Julian's a journalist watching America slide into algorithmic authoritarianism. When the A.I. starts speaking in riddles only he understands, he realizes the cult wasn't just abusing children. They were programming them.

As his suppressed memories surface, Julian discovers he's not a survivor. He's a weapon.

Now he must remember what they made him forget, before the obedience protocol hidden in his mind executes its final command.

In the tradition of Blake Crouch’s Recursion and Naomi Alderman’s The Power, Obedience Protocol is a pulse-pounding techno-thriller that explores memory, manipulation, and the algorithms that decide who we become.

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Excerpt from Obedience Protocol © Copyright 2025 Xander Gray

From Chapter 8

And the walls. God, the walls. They were covered. Scrawled with symbols. Circles. Spirals. Teeth-shapes. Eye-shapes. Loops intersecting with jagged lines that looked mathematical until they didn’t. Red. Or brown. Or something between. Faded at the edges. Some thick, crusted. Others thin and runny, like watercolors done in blood. They covered the walls, the ceiling, the floor.

He felt like he had seen them before. Like fragments of a language that had been left on the back of his brain since childhood, just waiting for the right moment to be understood.

He stepped inside. The smell hit him like a whisper. Something like wet metal and sweet plastic. Something synthetic that wanted to be organic. He felt a prickle in his sinuses. Warmth at the base of his skull. A tingle behind his eyes, like he was about to cry.

There was a chair in the center of the room. The seat was worn, the kind of wear from someone sitting very still, for an exceedingly long time.

Julian took one step closer to the wall and stopped. One of the symbols—a broken circle inside a broken square—looked drawn over. Scratched into. Painted and repainted like it meant something someone had forgotten how to say. Julian reached out without meaning to. His fingers stopped just short of touching it.
Then it happened. A flicker in his vision. A flash of something that did not belong to him: a child kneeling beside an altar holding a knife in both hands.

Gone.

He gasped and stumbled backward. The tingling behind his eyes spread. His jaw ached. His chest tightened, like oxygen wasn’t getting where it needed to go.

He turned back toward the door.

The symbols were everywhere now. Not just on the walls. In his mind. Floating behind his thoughts. Sliding between memory and meaning. He left the room with slow, measured steps. And decided right then he had seen enough of Cedarstone.

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