{ "item_title" : "Ari and the Dreaming Machine", "item_author" : [" Hope Copeland "], "item_description" : "Ari Bennett trusts machines because machines obey rules. A skilled but chronically sleep-deprived electronics technician, he spends his nights repairing obsolete circuits and salvaging forgotten components in a fading industrial town. His carefully ordered world begins to unravel when he discovers a battered tin automaton marked ORION-6 in a secondhand shop. The machine has no batteries, no functioning power source, and no apparent reason to be alive. Yet it vibrates with an impossible pulse, generates electricity from nowhere, and whispers through a mechanical voice that should have been silent for decades.Ari names the automaton Cinder and begins investigating its extraordinary circuitry. With the help of Felix Sterling, a former academic colleague, he discovers that the machine contains a mysterious electronic core incapable of generating images or inventing information. Its data is something far stranger: a direct recording of a real physical environment. At precisely 3:14 a.m., Cinder projects a decaying Victorian parlor into Ari's attic, transforming familiar walls into rotting timber, waterlogged plaster, and a staircase that should not exist. The projection has depth, temperature, and physical substance. When it vanishes, it leaves behind tangible evidence that no ordinary optical illusion can explain.As the nightly manifestations intensify, Ari follows the impossible architectural clues toward Ridgecrest Estate, an abandoned house hidden beyond the northern ridge. His investigation draws him into a disturbing mystery involving recorded memories, unexplained technology, and the fragile boundary between one reality and another. Meanwhile, the declining condition of his mother, Katherine, and the unsettling experiences of his sister, Hailey, force him to confront the possibility that the phenomenon reaches deeper into his family than he understands.Each new cycle brings Cinder closer to something concealed beneath the ruined estate. The machine's warnings become increasingly urgent, while its projections begin to overwrite Ari's surroundings with a place that seems to remember him. When the phenomenon turns physically dangerous, he must risk the journey to Ridgecrest and uncover the truth behind the device before another cycle traps him inside an impossible reality.But the greatest revelation lies beyond the decaying house itself. A photograph preserved inside a sealed cedar chest reveals a connection between Ari, a mysterious cyberneticist named Dorian Blackwell, and a future that should not yet exist. The warning written on the photograph's reverse raises a terrifying question: what happens when a machine does not merely record a dream, but prepares to dream the next one?A ri and the Dreaming Machine is an atmospheric science-fiction thriller blending experimental technology, temporal paradoxes, psychological tension, and uncanny horror. Through Ari's relentless search for measurable answers, it explores memory, identity, family, and the danger of treating reality as a system that can always be repaired. In a world where recorded experience can become physical and the future may already have left its fingerprints on the past, the most dangerous circuit may be the one that closes on itself.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers2.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/818/290/9798182907897_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "15.99", "online_price" : "15.99", "our_price" : "15.99", "club_price" : "15.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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