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Initial State
Paperback
Publisher: Ethan Ross
Published: Dec 23 2025
Pages: 230
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.52 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
INITIAL STATE
On a Tuesday morning in 2025, the world didn't end with a bang. It ended with a breath.
In a single heartbeat, a silent pulse from an orbiting satellite stripped eight billion people of their episodic memories. In an instant, names, families, debts, and hatreds vanished. Humanity was reduced to its Initial State: a planet of highly skilled ghosts who knew how to drive cars and perform surgeries, but couldn't remember the faces of their own children.
Aris Thorne is a surgeon who wakes up with a scalpel in his hand and a hollow where his soul used to be. Elara Vance is a woman being hunted by men in crimson jackets who seem to have kept their pasts. Together, they hold the only two things that can break the silence: a silver key hidden in a hollowed-out book and a flickering memory of a daughter who might not exist.
From the frozen, name-covered streets of Chicago to the porcelain-masked silence of Tokyo and the deep-sea graveyards of the Pacific, Initial State is a sweeping, 51-chapter epic that spans three decades of human struggle. It is a story of a world trying to decide if it wants its painful history back, or if it would rather stay beautiful, hollow, and forgotten.
As the first generation born into the silence grows up with a terrifyingly collective empathy, the survivors of the Great Wipe must face the ultimate question:
Is a life without pain worth living if it's a life without a name?
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