Glass Memory

In a fractured near-future where memory is a currency, identity is a trade, and truth is buried beneath layers of synthetic recall, one man hunts for an answer hidden in someone else's mind. Calder Raines is a memory thief—a skilled extractor who specializes in pulling secrets from the minds of the living and the dead. In the neon-lit underworld of New Carthage, his talents keep him ahead of danger, but barely out of reach of his past. When a mysterious black-market orb lands in his hands—one containing a fragmented memory not yet lived—Calder is pulled into a conspiracy that blurs the line between reality and illusion, future and past. The memory shows a murder that hasn't happened yet. Haunted by the image and hunted by factions who would kill to suppress it, Calder must untangle the origin of the memory before the timeline collapses around it. Alongside a cybernetic archivist with buried secrets and a disillusioned officer chasing ghosts of her own, Calder descends into the neural underground—a realm of mind-hacking, synthetic personas, and digital ghosts. But what he uncovers is more than just a plot to rewrite the future. It's a revelation about the nature of consciousness, the fragility of truth, and the question that drives all of humanity: can we ever truly own our memories—or do they own us? Glass Memory is a gritty sci-fi noir that blends cerebral mystery with emotional depth, exploring themes of identity, control, and the ever-thinning line between humanity and the systems we build to preserve it.