Sleeper Agent

By M. Anthony Harris

Stephen Matthews is the perfect spy. He just doesn't know it.

Stephen always thought that his dreams were just that, only dreams. What he hasn't yet realized is that when he sleeps, he has the ability to see through the eyes of others around him.

Soon Stephen is approached by a mysterious research center that wishes to unlock the limits of human potential by harnessing the powers of lucid dreaming. What Stephen doesn't know though, is that there's hidden depths to their research. He's being bred to be the perfect spy. A true sleeper agent.

Now thrust into a world of violence and terrorism, Stephen must quickly learn to harness his power if he wishes to save his own life and stop an attack that threatens to tear apart America's information infrastructure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M. Anthony Harris
• Release date: Dec 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370337811

M. Anthony Harris

M. Anthony Harris has been telling stories since he was a child when he would regal his siblings with thrilling tales of adventure. He currently resides in Qinghai province in the northwest of China. When he's not writing, you can find him practicing Kung Fu, drawing, painting, or honing his Mandarin skills by chatting in Chinese with whoever dares to talk to the strange laowai.

Book preview

Prologue

W ake him up! Whatever you do, don’t let him sleep! I heard through a bleary stupor. I slowly realized that it was me they were talking about. Everything had the molasses-like quality that came from sleep deprivation .

A wall of pain tore me away from the thoughts scampering through my mind. Only one thing held my attention. It was the agony of voltage coursing through me in numbers that were well over the quadruple digits.

That should snap him out of his stupor, I heard over a strange wailing that I soon recognized as my own voice.

What did you see? Give us your intel! one of the thugs screamed, spittle flying with the words.

You can tell someone means business when there’s spittle flying…. My mind wandered down sleep-deprived roads.

A fist to my gut interrupted that line of thought and brought me momentary clarity. I still didn’t know why I had been taken. I had come up with some promising answers close to seventy hours ago, but whatever conclusion I’d made had fled like my sleep.

Tell me exactly what you saw! the voice behind the fist insisted.

I don’t know what you’re talking about! I haven’t slept in days! I can barely remember anything! If you would please just let me sleep then maybe I wouldn’t be so freaking bleary and I might be able to actually remember whatever it is you want! A fist to the sternum shut me up quickly.

Your friends can’t help you, so do yourself a favor and just give up the information already! he shouted, his voice cutting through the haze of pain.

It’s like I’ve already told you! I have no clue what you are talking about. I haven’t been spying on anybody! I shot a wad of spit at his eyes.

My head snapped back with a solid right hook to the jaw. I nearly slipped into unconsciousness. I tried to surrender to it but was rudely shocked back to a state of hyperawareness mere seconds later as they reattached the jumper cables to the rusty metal chair and pumped me full of thousands of volts of electricity.

My body went limp, and I felt myself being dragged away, still awake.

Sir, I don’t think we’ll be getting any more answers out of him right now. Let’s throw him back in the cell.

1

My name is Stephen Matthews.

Stephen spelled with a ph not a v.

I’ve always thought that the ph made it sound more dignified. Not that you can hear the difference, but when you see it spelled with the ph you feel a certain gravitas that just isn’t there with the v.

Anyway, I had just started my graduate degree in electrical engineering. I had bounced around on majors for my first two years like every other university student before I settled into the program. I found that I liked the straightforwardness of electrical engineering. Everything is cause and effect. Too much power and you screw things up, too little and nothing happens.

I’ve long suspected that most engineers are the same. They may cloak things in fancy words and descriptions, but every single one of them tries to make the complicated simple.

That’s why I think that the complexity of my dream life was a strong force in driving me to the major.

Ever since I had been a kid—maybe around ten or eleven years old—I’ve had strangely lucid dreams, ones packed full of the strangest details. It was as if my body was asleep but my mind stayed awake.

Another odd thing was that I was almost never the main character in my dreams. It was as if I were watching a documentary of someone else’s life. Normally they were boring films; I would dream that I was a housewife saying goodbye to her husband, sitting down with a nice cup of tea, and reading a chick-lit book while my baby still slept; or sometimes I would be an accountant in some high-end firm, working on indescribably boring financial spreadsheets. Every so often the dreams would reoccur, but that was pretty rare. One night I was a mechanic, the next the president of the United States.

It never really crossed my mind how different it was until I, for some stupid reason—actually, a girl who was way out of my league whom, I later found out, was already dating someone—added a creative writing class. I thought it would be a piece of cake, and I could write the next great American novel and win the girl of my dreams.

Needless to say, I did neither. I’d thought that it’d be an easy couple of credits but it actually turned out to be one of the hardest classes I’d taken.

I found that creativity came to me as easily as a passing kidney stone. My first couple of papers didn’t do any favors for my GPA, so, to keep from floundering, I decided to write from my dreams.

The paper on a spy that’d been working to infiltrate a militant Islamic terror cell earned me my first A in the class, and my story on the day-to-day life of the president was submitted to a writing contest by my professor.

He said that he’d loved the time I’d put into working on the minute details and complimented me on great world-building. I was glad that he loved it because it had been one of the most tedious dreams I’d had in a long time. But I’d heard that literature professors reveled in the most tedious and pretentious of works, so, like Dickens, I left no description unturned.

I didn’t win the writing contest, but I did land a job.

I remember when they first approached me. It’d been about a month after my paper had placed sixth in the writing contest. I had just finished the judo course that I was taking as an elective and was sitting outside the campus cafeteria reading a textbook when an attractive lady who seemed to be five or six years older than me approached.

She was dressed professionally in a grey skirt and blazer and had angular cheekbones that were framed by a blond bob cut. She walked as if she owned the ground under her feet. She was the type of person who made an impression everywhere she went.

I was surprised when she passed the small group of professors—who were probably discussing ways to mess with the students and make an A average next to impossible—and headed straight toward me.

You’re Stephen Matthews, correct? she asked in a no-nonsense tone. I nodded.

"I read your story about the president, and I was impressed by your