The Bright Spot — Robert Sydney

Dashiell Hammett meets speculative fiction in this engaging tale of two thespians who become stars in a conspiracy beyond their control....

When struggling actors Nick and Luella meet, it's love at act one. But the show may close earlier than they think when they find that an easy gig re-creating the past for elderly James Dumfries is really a phony time-travel scam concocted to separate an old man from his money.

It turns out that Dumfries is no ordinary senior citizen. He is the creator of workware, a technology that has changed the world by enabling workers to manage the most tiresome tasks without complaint, training...or memory. What machines had once done, man can do again -- at the high price of his humanity. But that was never Dumfries's intention -- and now he doesn't just want to see the past, he wants to change it. Through Nick. Caught in the web of Dumfries's regrets and the government's lies, Nick and Lu soon find themselves in the spotlight of a decades-long drama...with a killer ending.