This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
'When I'm gone, let me be gone.'

It was the last thing Dr. Claudia Gold asked of her granddaughter. Janice Gold looked her in the eye and did not promise.

Claudia spent forty years as a neurosurgeon and never once found a person inside a brain. Janice, the software architect she raised, has spent her life trying to prove her wrong. Now Claudia is dead, and beneath her historic home on Taylor Street in Oregon City, ONOS BIO keeps six living minds suspended behind glass, each one alive enough to fire, respond, and be queried. What none of them has is time. The memories are there. The dates are not. And one sealed account, marked only with the initials C.G., refuses every attempt to place its final hour.

To solve it, Janice goes back to the people who knew her before she was dangerous. One by one, seven engineers from her old team at Xenon receive an offer too good to turn down: a salary that changes their lives, a limousine with no announced destination, and a two-week orientation where AI 'benches' test their ideas and quietly record everything else. Susan wants a fresh start for her twelve-year-old daughter. Mishka is watching her mother's lab results get worse. Trevor has been to the Costa Rican rainforest before, and he remembers what found him there. None of them is told that they are not only the staff. They are the reference data.

From a basement in Oregon to a white-water run in Colorado, from a casino conjured out of augmented reality to a laboratory cut into the side of the Arenal volcano, the team is pushed