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Digital Exhaust
Set amid the glass offices and digital half-lives of modern day Los Angeles, Digital Exhaust follows Christian, a mid-level tech worker adrift in the afterglow of his own collapse. Guided by a virtual therapist and haunted by a cam girl he can’t stop watching, he searches for connection that won’t cost him anything real.
When a coworker’s pool party ends in fire, Christian is drawn into a circuit of guilt, desire, and belief that leads him to a commune in Topanga Canyon — part coffee shop dormitory, part spiritual experiment — where his father and the woman from his screen promise the chance to begin again.
A novel about technology and transcendence, faith and performance, Digital Exhaust traces one man’s descent through mindfulness sessions, AI dating apps, and cultic renewal in search of something unbranded and alive. At once funny and mournful, it captures the quiet despair of a world where connection has become a transaction, and the soul another form of data.
Michael Mages is an author living in Los Angeles. This is his first novel.
When a coworker’s pool party ends in fire, Christian is drawn into a circuit of guilt, desire, and belief that leads him to a commune in Topanga Canyon — part coffee shop dormitory, part spiritual experiment — where his father and the woman from his screen promise the chance to begin again.
A novel about technology and transcendence, faith and performance, Digital Exhaust traces one man’s descent through mindfulness sessions, AI dating apps, and cultic renewal in search of something unbranded and alive. At once funny and mournful, it captures the quiet despair of a world where connection has become a transaction, and the soul another form of data.
Michael Mages is an author living in Los Angeles. This is his first novel.
317 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 13, 2026
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