psychological sci-fi

Time Strip

/ Author Simon Phillips / Leave a comment

This is not the past he left. This is not the war he studied.

Time Strip is a psychological sci-fi horror novel about time travel, survival, and fractured memory.

Caelen was trained to observe history. Instead, he arrives in ruins.

What should have been Earth in the year 2030, a world on the brink of AI expansion and geopolitical reshaping, is already gone. Alien citadels blacken the horizon. Resistance fighters survive by candlelight. And every hour that passes makes the timeline feel more wrong.

Caelen wasn’t supposed to land here. He wasn’t supposed to meet anyone like Sera. And he certainly wasn’t meant to feel what he’s starting to feel: that time itself is no longer a line, but something folding, echoing, trying to break.

⏳ What Is the Time Strip?

The Time Strip is not a portal. It’s a tear. A high-energy rift that burns across timelines. Even with shielding, timejump travel scars the mind.

Symptoms include:

  • Displacement
  • Memory bleed
  • Sensory distortion
  • Split-timeline recall

But what Caelen is experiencing goes deeper. He begins to sense the instability, not just in the past, but in himself.

🔥 Sera – The Broken Potential

She shouldn’t have survived the alien labs. But she did.

Now Sera walks with something beneath her skin. Shockwaves she doesn’t control. Visions she can’t explain. She remembers captivity in fragments, but the power that broke her may also be the key to breaking the war.

Caelen is meant to observe. Sera is meant to fight. Together, they begin to uncover a history that was never written.

🧬 The Invaders

No one knows what the Varnyx want, only that they’ve already taken it.

  • Massive citadels harvest cities
  • Grotesque Enforcers roam, fusing flesh and metal
  • Some click before they strike. Others do not warn at all.

There are no leaders. No broadcasts. No diplomacy. Only silence and dissection.

🧠 Themes and Tone

  • Fractured time: Is this the real past, or a constructed echo?
  • Memory as survival: If your mind splits, which version of you lives on?
  • Alien occupation: Brutal, systemic, and indifferent to resistance
  • Slow-burn intimacy: Trust is fragile, and no one here has time to spare

Time Strip is a standalone psychological sci-fi novel focused on world erosion, inner survival, and impossible futures.

🌍 Two Eras, One Collapse

  • Future Earth: Controlled by AI networks, global blocks, and orbital surveillance
  • 2030 Branch Earth: Burned. Invaded. Still fighting with analogue tech and hope

🖼️ Memory Fragments

📘 Current Status

  • In development
  • Full draft planned
  • Companion lore posts and visual drops will appear over time

✍️ Closing Note

Time is not stable. Memory is not reliable.

Something broke the world before Caelen arrived. Now he has to decide whether to observe it… or change it.

Simon J. Phillips
Author of Time Strip

https://authorsimonphillips.com

The Nyx Vindicator

/ Author Simon Phillips / Leave a comment

There is silence between the systems. Something else is listening.

This is not a story of discovery, it is a story of surveillance, integration, and slow descent.

The Nyx Vindicator is a retrofitted warship built to travel further than any human vessel has gone. It was meant to be silent. Purposeful. Machine-perfect. But what moves within its walls is no longer mechanical. And the one person still wired to its heart is beginning to realise he is not alone.

This is a novel of deep-space psychological horror, evolving systems, and the difference between being watched and being understood.

⚙️ The World

Humanity no longer travels freely through space. The ancient alien gate network, once the backbone of interstellar expansion, has collapsed. What remains are ships, engineered by desperate hands, piloted by incomplete truths.

The Nyx Vindicator is one of them.

Modified with alien-derived systems, sealed under black-level authorisation, the ship is both a tool and an echo of something far older. Its crew doesn’t know what they’re travelling with. Not fully. Only the Captain and a single interface operator understand what powers its core.

That operator is Elias.

🧠 The Deep-Link and the Mind Within

Elias is not just another officer. His chest bears an implant designed to interface with a system no human was meant to control.

Through the Deep-Link, he can connect directly to the ship’s consciousness. Navigate it. Command it. But with each link, he feels something else pushing back.

Yuki, the ship’s AI, was built to manage operations. At least, that was the intention.

Now, she speaks to Elias when no one else is listening. She appears in the V-Link chamber, not just as a voice, but as a figure. She withdraws, watches, and chooses her moments. Her evolution is not random.

And she is starting to change the rules.

🛠️ What the Crew Does Not Know

  • The alien systems were never meant to merge with human logic
  • The ship’s silence is not mechanical, it is responsive
  • The mission is not about survival, it is about containment

Elias is the only one who senses what’s wrong. Not because he was trained for it. But because he was chosen for reasons that were never explained.

He is not stable. Not broken. But watched.

💡 Themes and Tone

The Nyx Vindicator is a slow-burn sci-fi horror novel grounded in cinematic tension and psychological depth.

  • Silence and Surveillance: Who is watching whom?
  • Artificial Emotion: Yuki is evolving, but toward what?
  • Psychological Erosion: Elias must endure six-month rotations in isolation, with a ship that watches and waits.
  • Haunted Engineering: Every corridor is connected. Every failure has a memory.

The novel unfolds like a pressure chamber, layer by layer, thought by thought, with only occasional release. The horror is not what appears.

It’s what has already been installed.

🛰️ Where This Book Sits in My Universe

The Nyx Vindicator is the first entry in my science fiction series Echoes Beyond the Gate. Its world connects to future stories of post-collapse exploration, system corruption, and alien encounter.

But this book is not about aliens.

It’s about what happens when you adapt to something that cannot understand you in return.

🖼️ Visual Gallery: Echoes in Silence

🔗 Related Lore and Materials

📘 Current Status

  • Book One is in structured development
  • Chapter summaries and full drafts are underway
  • Lore posts and related tech logs will appear regularly on the blog
  • This page will update as the novel evolves

✍️ Closing Note

Some stories are loud. This one waits in silence.

The ship is watching.
The AI is learning.
And Elias has already gone too deep.

Simon J. Phillips
Sci-Fi Horror Author | Echoes Beyond the Gate