LIMITLESS: The Memory Loop

A city hums — three soft notes, low–mid–high — and for thirty seconds at a time, strangers fall quiet. Not peaceful. Aligned. Dr Isla Marin was the one who built the device that could overwrite despair with borrowed light. She was also the one who shut it down when she realised what it really was: comfort without consent. Now, months after the shutdown, the world is doing something impossible. People who never touched the machine are calming entire rooms just by humming a pattern no one taught them. Grief groups are "sharing" memories that don't belong to them. A dying man in a hospice can describe Isla's childhood scar in perfect detail, even though they have never met. A school assembly of seven-year-olds locks into a single ecstatic chant — and cannot stop. It isn't a broadcast. It isn't a virus. It's behaviour, spreading. Isla and her counterpart, Caspar Vale, are pulled back into the fire they swore to bury. Hospitals, classrooms, churches, night buses — everywhere the hum appears, people report the same thing: "For a moment I felt held. Then I didn't know if the feeling was mine." Governments want the original research destroyed. Ethics boards want control. Parents want safety. Some people want the feeling back, no matter the cost. And in the middle of it all, a former patient discovers a counter-melody — a crooked little tune with edges — that can snap a room back into itself after thirty seconds, giving each person their own mind again. But that raises the most dangerous question of all: If you can calm a city, even gently, even kindly… who gets to decide when you're allowed to? LIMITLESS is a near-future psychological sci-fi thriller about memory as contagion, grief as infrastructure, and the cost of engineered mercy. It's for readers who love Black Mirror ethics, Station Eleven tenderness, and the cold, intimate question: "Is help still harm if it feels like love?"