Midnight Semester

In the winter of 2025, the world finally achieved perfection—and it was a graveyard. At the elite St. Jude's Academy, students are forbidden from using personal devices. In their place is the Echo, a revolutionary social interface that maps their thoughts, optimizes their joy, and archives their memories. But scholarship student Anya Thorne soon realizes the cost of "Syncing." Students aren't just graduating; they are being "Withdrawn"—replaced by digital shadows that live on in the network long after their physical selves have vanished. When her roommate Sarah disappears, leaving behind a frantic, hand-written diary and a trail of digital static, Anya is thrust into a global conspiracy. From the Gothic, ivy-covered walls of St. Jude's to the liquid-cooled server-cities of Manhattan and the radioactive silence of the Mojave Desert, Anya must lead a ragtag resistance of the "Uncalibrated." Armed with only an analog manual override key and the messy, disorganized power of human memory, Anya and the crew of the Static—a rusted oil tanker turned floating fortress—must confront the Archive's final goal: the Hard-Reset. As the line between the physical and the digital dissolves, Anya faces a terrifying choice: accept a perfect, painless dream, or fight for a reality that is cold, broken, and undeniably real. The Noise is just beginning.