A.R. Marquez is a principal software engineer, visual designer, and music video producer based in New Mexico. He began his career as a freelance designer in Los Angeles in 2007 — the same year One Ascent Time is set — and has spent eighteen years since building at the intersection of technology, music, and visual culture. His engineering work has spanned frontend architecture at Hulu and Disney+, enterprise systems at national laboratories including Los Alamos and Sandia, and AI evaluation engineering for frontier language models. His creative practice runs parallel: brand identity, cinematic content production, and a music and visual identity under the name Rezurrector.

One Ascent Time draws on all of it. The eye for shop interiors and the way a city reads from a moving car. The ear for how a room's acoustic changes when amplification enters it. The instinct — built from years of designing systems — that a city is always running two processes at once, and that what looks like signal is sometimes noise, and what looks like noise is sometimes the thing you were waiting to hear.

The novel takes place on a single Friday — October 5th, 2007, the year the world went wireless — and follows twelve characters converging on one instrument. A freelance designer named Nash E. Raya buys a hand-carved, kintsugi-repaired guitar for the wrong price on Ventura Boulevard. Sixty miles west, a collector who commissioned that instrument thirty years earlier watches the Pacific and waits. Below the break, three sisters hear their mother's voice at low volume for the first time in their lives.

It is the first book of The Signal Cycle, a planned six-novel sequence pairing six cities with six instruments. The companion audiobook and a vertical video series are in development.