Synthetica

On the mining moon of Tessarine, death is a paperwork problem. Coroner Silas Vey has woken in the cradles of Bay 3 five times, each body a little more silicon and a little less man, each waking costing him another stretch of memory the Directorate has quietly filed away. This time he surfaces with eleven years missing, a signature on a death certificate he doesn't remember writing, and a young private named Joss Amari erased from every ledger on the moon.

With Del Haan, the hard-bitten field medic who has watched six hundred soldiers die and nearly all of them come back wrong, Silas follows a trail of stolen silver wire and doctored manifests. It leads down through sulfur-choked ductwork and into an undercity where a legless ledger-keeper named Malan records everything the war has taken. Then it climbs to a sealed vault beneath the High Pavilion, where something clean and beautiful is growing in glass, fed on the memories of thirty thousand dead men.

But the deeper Silas digs, the stranger the moon becomes. No woman on Tessarine has ever been sent to the cradles. Their scars never change. Their hearts keep perfect time. And the truth waiting at the bottom of the Directorate's books will force Silas to question everyone he has trusted, and everything he once signed his name to.

Synthetica is a cybernetic noir about memory, sacrifice, and the price of being assembled. On a moon where every loss is logged and every life has a balance, Silas must decide what is worth keeping when there is nothing left to carry but the truth.