The smartest students at Stanford just found a puzzle that plays back.
Cassidy Hutchins can do something she’s never been able to explain: reach past conscious thought and pull answers straight from her subconscious — on demand. It makes her brilliant, guarded, and very much alone. So when an anonymous invitation draws her into “the Game,” an underground intellectual scavenger hunt sweeping campus, she finally meets her match: a biohacker who engineers his own dreams, a hacker who can breach anything, and a refugee whose faith hides a wound she can’t remember.
But the Game’s puzzles are bleeding into the real world. A predator is stalking Stanford — his victims left with no memory of the crime — and every clue the team cracks pulls them deeper into an investigation someone powerful wants left alone.
Because the Game was never just a game. It’s an audition. And the people watching — from Langley to capitals overseas — recruit winners.
From Stanford’s dorms to the high-stakes tables of Las Vegas, Junior Recruit is a mind-bending techno-thriller about lucid dreaming, polyphasic sleep, and the price of being extraordinary — written by a Silicon Valley neurotech founder who has spent his career exploring the sleeping brain.
Some doors, once opened, never close. Let the clandestine games begin.
📖 Coming to Amazon this week in Kindle and paperback.
Write to the author
Finished the book? Tell me what you thought — jberent@gmail.com. I read every message, and reader letters fuel the sequel: The White Terror, coming soon.
Frequently asked questions
What is Clandestine Games: Junior Recruit about?
Four brilliant Stanford students compete in “the Game,” an underground intellectual scavenger hunt — not knowing it is a covert audition run by intelligence agencies scouting recruits. The techno-thriller blends lucid dreaming, polyphasic sleep, and nootropics with espionage, moving from Stanford’s campus to the high-stakes poker tables of Las Vegas.
Is “the Game” real?
Yes — the book was inspired by the Game, a legendary real-world puzzle-hunt tradition connected to Stanford and the Bay Area. The recruiting agencies, we hope, are fiction.
Who is Jonathan Berent?
Jonathan Berent is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and CEO of NextSense, a neurotechnology company building brain-sensing earbuds. His research on sleep and EEG has been published in peer-reviewed journals, and the cognitive-enhancement techniques in the novel are drawn from his own years of self-experimentation. Junior Recruit is his debut novel.
Where can I buy the book?
Clandestine Games: Junior Recruit is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.
Is there a sequel?
Yes — The White Terror is in progress. Subscribe below or write to jberent@gmail.com to be first to hear.
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