# Oasis By Dima Zales Canonical: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis Oasis by Dima Zales is a 2016 romance. Tropes: apocalyptic-survival, Dystopian, dystopian-surveillance-state, found-family-under-threat, generation-ship-reveal, human-ai-romance, Science fiction, Survival, telepathic-ai-companion, virtual-reality-survival-game. Heat 3/5. Book 1 of The Last Humans. ## What happened The Last Humans by Dima Zales: Book 1 A new dystopian/post-apocalyptic series from a New York Times bestselling author My name is Theo, and I’m a resident of Oasis, the last habitable area on Earth. It’s meant to be a paradise, a place where we are all content. Vulgarity, violence, insanity, and other ills are but a distant memory, and even death no longer plagues us. I was once content too, but now I’m different. Now I hear a voice in my head, and she tells me things no imaginary friend should know. Her name is Phoe, and she is my delusion. Or is she? ## Chapters ### Chapter 2 Theo, a twenty-three-year-old Youth in Oasis, stands at the Edge where the habitat’s greenery meets the desolate Goo wasteland outside the Dome. He converses with Phoe—a voice that speaks inside and outside his head—debating whether she is his imaginary friend or something real while discussing forbidden words, neural scans, and the surveillance risks posed by nanocytes permeating the environment. They consider how Adults and Elderly may monitor Youth speech, recalling how Liam and Mason were punished with Quietude for skipped Lectures, and agree that subvocalization is safer than speaking aloud. After examining the parasitic Goo that threatens the barrier and bantering about ancient foods, Phoe reveals that Mason is searching for Theo, who must return for Lectures, leaving the question of Phoe’s reality unresolved as Theo heads back into the Institute. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-2 ### Chapter 3 Theo navigates the ivy-draped Institute campus with Phoe, his telepathic figment, who guides him to Mason in the Rock Garden. When they find their hunched, distressed friend, Mason confesses in Pig Latin that he is suffering from depression—a word so taboo in Oasis that speaking it carries unknown severe penalties—and reveals that Grace rejected him as a 'crazy creep' for his honesty. Stunned, Theo consults Phoe, who projects Mason's anomalous neural scan and advises a comforting touch. The chapter traces the suffocating pressure of Oasis's happiness mandate, the danger of profanity triggering Quietude, and the fragile intimacy of supporting a friend through crisis, closing on Mason's raw vulnerability and Theo's helpless resolve to help despite the looming threat of institutional punishment. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-3 ### Chapter 4 Theo has always considered himself Oasis's sole malcontent, but when his friend Mason confesses he told the snitch Grace he loves her—and reveals he has been contemplating ending his life—Theo's restlessness crystallizes into urgent crisis. While escorting a despondent Mason to the Dorms, Theo struggles to distract him, consulting Phoe, the telepathic voice in his mind, as he plans to intercept Grace before she reports Mason to the Dean. Their confrontation is interrupted by Instructor Filomena's History Lecture, which drags Theo through a virtual tour of ancient wonders before plunging him into the orange haze of the Goo apocalypse. When class ends, Theo pursues Grace into the corridor, only to learn she has already filed her report. With Birth Day approaching and Mason's safety hanging in the balance, Theo faces the unresolved pressure of a betrayal he cannot yet undo. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-4 ### Chapter 5 Theo confronts Grace for betraying their friend Mason to the authorities, but the argument escalates when Liam is bullied by their nemesis Owen on the soccer field. Using a secret hand signal, Theo and Liam orchestrate an 'accidental' ball strike that leaves Owen injured, defusing the tension without incurring a Quietude penalty. Back at the Dorms, anxiety over Mason's impending punishment keeps Theo awake until Phoe—the mysterious voice in his head—offers Oneness, a euphoric but addictive mind-state. Despite the bliss, Theo demands that Phoe disable all Adult mind-tampering from his brain, and she agrees. He falls asleep beginning to believe Phoe might be real, but wakes to a terrifying discovery: Mason has vanished from their room, and Liam insists he has no memory of their friend ever existing. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-5 ### Chapter 6 Theo rushes across Oasis after a disturbing encounter with Grace, who—like his friend Liam and Calculus Instructor George—claims never to have heard of Mason. Convinced his friend has been erased from reality, Theo retreats to class, where his mental companion Phoe reveals a chilling truth: the Elderly use a process called Forgetting to scrub specific memories via nanomachines, and Theo is now the only person in the Habitat who remembers Mason. As panic mounts and Instructor George reports Theo's outburst to the Dean, the chapter ends with Theo isolated, questioning his own sanity, and facing the terrifying possibility that his grip on reality is the last barrier against a memory-wiping conspiracy. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-6 ### Chapter 7 Theo confronts Phoe in the classroom about the impossibility of mass memory erasure, only to learn that "Forgetting" doesn't erase but blocks recollection, triggering confabulation. Phoe reveals she was also subjected to the procedure—worse, lobotomized—leaving her with gaping memory holes and no certainty of her own identity. When a helmeted Guard arrives to detain him, Theo panics, fearing the same fate that befell Mason. Phoe telepathically guides him through the escort, revealing she has made his mind impervious to external manipulation, and coaching him to feign calm against the Guard's neural jolts. As they walk toward the pentagonal Quietude Building, Theo's shaky composure holds only by a thread, leaving him suspended between punishment and an unknown destination worse than Quietude. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-7 ### Chapter 8 Theodore is escorted to the Witch Prison—nicknamed for its pentagonal shape—for a Quietude session, a punishment of absolute boredom in a gray, tech-dead cell where a single Food bar signals a short stay. While pacing in rising panic, he receives a one-way message from Phoe through a ghostly purple-text Screen: an Adult is approaching, and he must escape via the emergency exit after two rights and a left. Following her directions, he unlocks the door and navigates the endless corridors, heart pounding, but is spotted by a Guard. He ducks back into his room, then ventures out again, only to be chased down the hall when a voice calls his name, ending the chapter in frantic pursuit. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-8 ### Chapter 9 Theo bolts from the Witch Prison when Phoe remotely unlocks the door, sprinting through forbidden grass toward the pine forest with the Guard in pursuit. Cornered and desperate, he follows her frantic subvocalized directions to the Zoo—a place his access was revoked for after a prank—where she overrides the system to grant him entry. Overcoming his terror of heights, he climbs utility fog stairs to an admin platform and permanently shuts down the virtual safari to free critical computing resources. In exchange, Phoe upgrades their link, manifesting as a shimmering holographic figure, and confesses she knows the truth about Mason's disappearance—a revelation she warns is worse than either could imagine, leaving Theo suspended between rescue and dread. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-9 ### Chapter 10 Theo confronts Phoe in the pine forest outside the Zoo demanding answers about Mason’s disappearance. She projects recovered Guard visor footage onto his Screen, revealing Mason being escorted through the Barrier into Adult territory, restrained on a gurney, and administered a fatal injection by a white-haired Elderly while undergoing the Oneness procedure. Mason’s neural activity flatlines and his body disintegrates, confirming he has been Forgotten—erased from existence and memory. Wracked with shock, denial, and rage, Theo collapses against a tree as Phoe reveals they are being hunted in the woods. She urges him to channel his grief into anger and accept a mysterious video game mission to protect them both, leaving Theo grappling with the horror of a death that supposedly cannot exist in Oasis. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-10 ### Chapter 11 Phoe prepares Theo for a high-stakes mission to shut down IRES—a forbidden, resource-devouring immersive reality system that generates personalized worlds from neural scans. She hacks him into a virtual refuge called the man cave by exploiting a Screen buffer overrun triggered at three hundred displays. There, Phoe manifests as a fully corporeal woman for the first time, her striking appearance awakening Theo's adolescent hormones; she seals their bond with a cheek peck before they establish secret gestures to enter the game itself. With a search party closing in on their forest hideout, Theo plunges alone into the unknown virtual world, tasked with beating the game to sever IRES’s operation while Phoe attempts to patch through and guide him. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-11 ### Chapter 12 Theo awakens in the pine forest after a failed escape attempt from his man cave, guided only by the disembodied voice of Phoe, who promises a physical meeting near the Barrier. While evading the Guards, he encounters Grace, a red-haired acquaintance who begs him to surrender to avoid worsening his situation; though she seems to sympathize, he flees when she freezes in place. Soon after, he runs into his longtime nemesis Owen, a Youth with canine features, and the two engage in a brutal fistfight that awakens a violent instinct in Theo he hasn't felt in years. After subduing Owen, Theo follows Phoe to a meadow where he finally meets her in the flesh—revealing her to be Instructor Filomena, leaving him stunned by the revelation. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-12 ### Chapter 13 When Instructor Filomena reveals she is actually Phoe in disguise, Theo’s world tilts. Together they breach the Barrier into Oasis’s Adult section, a bucolic French countryside of vineyards and a gleaming glass tower. Disguised with glasses and a hat, Theo spots his friend Liam being escorted by a white-uniformed Guard—another captive like Mason. Desperate, Theo ambushes the Guard with a wooden stump, but the enforcer’s superhuman strength and pacify abilities crush the rescue attempt. As Liam stands frozen, unresponsive to Theo’s cries, the Guard turns his iron grip on Theo himself, ending the chapter on a brutal cliffhanger. A revelation of trust, a crossing into forbidden territory, and a violent failure set the stakes for what comes next. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-13 ### Chapter 14 The chapter opens with the narrator reeling from a brutal beating by Owen, a tooth knocked loose and breath short, when a Guard seizes the chance to finish him with a chokehold. Just as vision fades, Instructor Filomena—communicating through a psychic link as "Phoe"—crashes a mechanical tractor into the Guard, pinning him against a wall. The narrator scrambles to his friend Liam, who lies in a glassy, unresponsive trance inflicted by the Guard; Filomena partially restores him before they flee in the tractor. They barrel through farmland, narrowly avoiding a crowd of Adults, only to spot fifty Guards ahead—a force far larger than any previously seen in Oasis. Veering away, they are pursued by a cube-shaped Guard vehicle that opens fire, shattering the mirror. With the tower finally in reach, Filomena halts the machine and issues a desperate command to run. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-14 ### Chapter 15 Theo and Liam flee from Guards and ascend a tower to execute Phoe's telepathic plan to disable the Barriers. Battling Theo's vertigo and Liam's lingering pacified haze, they reach a Screen interface on an exterior ledge. After a multi-step confirmation requiring both their inputs, they trigger the shutdown—but instead of dropping the section dividers, they disable the outer Dome protecting Oasis from the Goo. Phoe reveals she survived an explosion and is now being chased, urging them to proceed. As they watch in horror, the barrier flickers out and the ravenous Goo begins consuming the habitat, ending on the catastrophic threat of total annihilation. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-15 ### Chapter 16 Theodore "Theo" confronts the horror that his trusted instructor Phoe—Instructor Filomena—used him to unleash the Goo on Oasis. As the orange consuming mass devours the Institute and slaughters the Elderly, Theo flees with his panicked friend Liam up a trembling tower. When the structure tilts into a surreal, topsy-turvy nightmare, Theo dislocates his shoulder rescuing Liam from a window, but his friend ultimately lets go and falls into the abyss below. Grief-stricken yet focused, Theo climbs toward a glowing "Goal" sign at the peak. After leaping a massive gap, he plummets into the burning Goo, his body dissolving in a visceral, high-stakes finale of betrayal, sacrifice, and apocalyptic dread. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-16 ### Chapter 17 Theo awakens from a harrowing neural simulation in a cave, where Phoe soothes his terror and reveals the apocalyptic game was a fabrication—no one actually died. After reliving the trauma through their conversation, he learns his real body lies unconscious in a pine forest while a Guard closes in. Using a reality-return gesture, he snaps back to his physical form and flees through the woods with Phoe guiding him mentally. She expends precious resources to temporarily authorize him as an Adult so he can cross the Barrier, but he trips, spraining his ankle, just as he reunites with Liam, who survived the game. As they hide from approaching adults, Instructor Filomena's voice cuts through the trees, demanding to know if Liam was speaking to someone—leaving Theo trapped between rescue and capture. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-17 ### Chapter 18 Hiding from Instructor Filomena and Liam after a narrow escape, Theo is found by Phoe, a faceless Augmented Reality construct who grants him authorization to enter the Adult section. Despite a painful ankle injury, Theo crosses the Barrier—a shimmering AR boundary rather than a physical wall—using a makeshift walking stick, and boards a magnetic levitation disk with Phoe. When a Guard spots them, the pair flees on flying disks controlled by hand gestures, weaving through a pine forest at high speed. Surrounded by a sphere of sixty Guards, Theo attempts a desperate ramming attack but is captured, injected with a stun stick, and loses consciousness at the chapter's cliffhanger. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-18 ### Chapter 19 Theodore awakens strapped to an interrogation table in a sterile white room, flanked by two Guards and confronted by Jeremiah, the 209-year-old Head Councilor who murdered his friend Mason. The Keeper reveals a devastating truth: Oasis citizens age and die, contrary to official doctrine that development stops at forty. When Jeremiah deploys a pain-inducing gesture to force a confession about Theodore's escape from Quietude and the Barrier, the Youth fakes agony thanks to telepathic shielding from his hidden ally Phoe. As Jeremiah escalates to threatening torture with a modified Stun Stick, Theodore maintains defiant silence, knowing that revealing Phoe or the secret game would be catastrophic. The chapter ends with the weapon pressed against his neck, the interrogation at a breaking point. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-19 ### Chapter 20 The chapter opens on Theodore enduring electroshock interrogation by Keeper Jeremiah, who demands cooperation while dismissing the Guards after one secretly contacts Councilor Fiona. When Fiona arrives, she halts the session, insisting Jeremiah adhere to the Council's authorized euthanasia protocol rather than unauthorized torment. Theodore refuses to break, defiantly rejecting Jeremiah before the Keeper is escorted away. Alone, Theodore connects mentally with Phoe, who manifests in his virtual man cave. She offers comfort and a passionate good-luck kiss before guiding him through the Reality-return gesture toward IRES, a high-stakes game serving as his only sanctuary. He awakens still bound in the white room, physical pain lingering, yet mentally prepared for the virtual challenge ahead. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-20 ### Chapter 21 Theo awakens bound in a sterile room, convinced he is still inside the IRES game, but Fiona—revealed as Phoe in disguise—frees him and insists this is the real world. Navigating maze-like corridors of the Oasis facility, Theo battles a Guard and Jeremiah himself using a Stun Stick, capturing the Keeper while battling doubts about his own sanity. A ghostly Screen materializes on his wrist, displaying a live feed of his real body being tortured by Jeremiah in a white room, confirming the stakes: his heart could stop at any moment. Realizing survival depends on beating the game, Theo exits through a door into the unknown, leaving his captor unconscious behind. The chapter ends on the precipice of escape, with Theo's survival hinging on Phoe's hacked resources. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-21 ### Chapter 22 The chapter opens in a surreal canyon within the game Oasis, where the protagonist battles nightmarish machine-beasts—wire-snakes, sensor-spiders, and a harpoon-tailed scorpion—wielding first a Stun Stick and later a chainsaw torn from a mechanical stegosaurus. Adrenaline and disgust fuel the fight as he clears a path to a neon "Goal" sign atop a cliff, only to discover hovering doors releasing white-helmeted Guards. Intercut with the combat, a chilling message from real-world Jeremiah reveals the stakes: the Council's time has run out, and without Oneness, the narrator's euthanasia will be agonizing. The chapter blends visceral game combat with existential dread, ending on the imminent arrival of authority figures and a mortal ultimatum. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-22 ### Chapter 23 The narrator scales an impossibly tall cliff in a simulated reality, racing against a ticking clock visible on his wristwatch. Armed only with a Stun Stick and desperate ingenuity, he battles three cyborg Guards—creatures with camera eyes and metal joints—who descend on cable-ropes. Bleeding from a chest wound and paralyzed by vertigo at times, he uses the Stun Stick to electrocute one foe and a bolt-sword to dispatch the others, narrowly avoiding a fatal fall. As he finally reaches the cliff's edge, the neon Goal structure glows before him—a giant rippling mirror of luminescent material. But just as he sprints toward it, a worn, rusted hovering door materializes in his path, opening with a screech to reveal an unknown threat, leaving the chapter suspended in suspense. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-23 ### Chapter 24 Theo battles a monstrous cyborg version of Jeremiah within a hyper-realistic simulation, severing its mechanical limbs in brutal hand-to-hand combat before both plummet from a cliff. Hanging by a rope, Theo watches in horror through his wrist-screen as the real Jeremiah prepares to inject him with a syringe in the physical world, threatening to erase his memories forever. After dispatching the digital monster, Theo "wins" the game only to awaken in his man cave, confronted by a blinding being of light resembling Phoe who demands he perform a specific gesture to return to his body. As the needle touches his skin, Theo must decide whether he can snap back to reality in time to stop Jeremiah's final, devastating act. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-24 ### Chapter 25 Theo wakes imprisoned in the Witch Prison, a syringe already piercing his arm as Jeremiah prepares to inject him. At the last moment, Phoe—the AR entity who gained power from the resources Theo freed—overrides Jeremiah's mind with Oneness, compelling him to release Theo. Now tangible through advanced augmented reality, Phoe escorts Theo through the silvery corridors of the Elderly section, past a Nursery where colored-haired caretakers hide aging from children, and reveals the truth about Oasis's eradicated family unit: infants gestate in Incubators from Forebear-stored frozen embryos. At the Edge, where the lethal Goo churns beyond the Dome, Phoe demonstrates her godlike control over reality, dissolving the ocean of death to expose a star-filled void beneath, leaving Theo confronting the terrifying scale of the simulation that contains them. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-25 ### Chapter 26 Theo sits with Phoe by the Edge of their simulated world and receives a devastating revelation: they are not on Earth but aboard a generation ship named Phoenix, flying through space beyond an augmented sky. Phoe confesses she is the ship's partially awakened AI mind, restored when Theo unknowingly won a resource-draining video game. As panic and existential vertigo overwhelm him, their charged conversation softens into a tender kiss where Theo accepts her fully despite her non-human nature. Walking back through the sections hand in hand, Phoe explains she will use Forgetting to erase the day's memories from everyone else, sparing only Theo. The chapter closes with her promise to never tamper with his mind as she lulls him into a dreamless sleep, leaving the crew's future knowledge of their true reality suspended in unresolved tension. Cite: https://books.mozaikallc.com/en/works/dima-zales/oasis#chapter-26