When you owe the Digital Oligarchy more than credits, they come to collect your consciousness. Darby Skelm wakes in a bathtub full of eels with DebtHounds closing in. As a zeroed-out freelancer with stolen neural implants and scrambled identity, he's got hours before SKELM CORPS' debt collection drones drag him back to solvency-or worse, turn him into a beta test for their experimental consciousness integration protocols. With his crew of glitched-out hackers, Darby races through fractured virtual reality networks where human consciousness has become the ultimate commodity. Their destination: The Styx Firewall, where lost love Penny supposedly waits between deletion and digital transcendence. The Botnet, the Glitch, and the Payload launches The SKELM Chronicles, a seven-book cyberpunk noir series exploring consciousness as currency in a world where corporations have optimized reality itself. First in a planned 77-book epic spanning 11 series, each featuring programming languages as chapter titles.