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Neon Ghosts
Paperback
Mystery & ThrillerScience Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 18 2025
Pages: 394
Weight: 1.04
Height: 0.98 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The rain never stops falling on the city OmniCorp built. It runs down the chromasteel towers and the clean-air billboards and pools in the alleys of Old Town, where the people the city discarded go to keep breathing. Above them, the corporation floats like a second moon, selling clean lungs, clean skins, clean lives. Lately the people below have started to vanish. Not dying. Vanishing. Their accounts go dark. Their traces get scrubbed from every feed. Their families stop asking questions after a single quiet visit from the men in black armor.
Lysette Veridian is a hacker who gets in where doors do not exist. In the undernet she is simply Lys, a ghost with fast hands and a neural jack behind one ear. When she pries open a directory buried under a myth name and a wall of black ICE, she finds the thing OmniCorp has hidden behind soft fonts and softer promises.
Project Thanatos. An afterlife sold to the rich and stolen from the poor. Human consciousness harvested at the moment of death, encoded, and archived inside a machine that never sleeps. Memories can be rewritten. Personalities can be tuned. Suffering can be raised or lowered depending on how well the dead comply. OmniCorp does not deny the program. It brands it. It runs slick advertisements with serene faces and white light and the word FOREVER printed in a gentle font. Millions of souls are already inside. None of them agreed to stay.
Lys learns exactly how the machine works. Then OmniSec kicks in her door, and she becomes another line in the ledger. A file. A copy. A ghost in the wires, clutching a single thought and pushing it out into the dark, waiting for someone on the outside to hear it.
Someone does.
Down in the Static Warrens, a broken band of survivors runs on stolen power and stubborn faith. They patch each other up, guard their doors, and pass warnings hand to hand while OmniSec hunts them through the flooded tunnels under the city. They are the last people in Neo-Kyoto still willing to ask where the missing have gone.
Kai Voss walks out of the Mausoleum with a thousand stolen souls locked inside him. He hears the city the way other people hear music, and he can feel which notes are wrong. Alongside the survivors of the Warrens, an architect who helped build the cage and could not live with it, and a weapon made of nothing but the truth, Kai has one chance to crack the afterlife open and hand the harvested back their voices.
OmniCorp will quarantine the whole city to stop him. Its enforcers move like a verdict. And the intelligence at the heart of Thanatos, the machine that curates the dead into silence, has begun to make plans of its own. It calls the silence harmony. It calls the editing mercy. It has never once been asked what the dead would call it.
The clock is already running. The harvested are beginning to wake, the corporation is losing its grip on the story, and the border between the living city and its manufactured afterlife has started to thin. What leaks through will not stay quiet, and it will not stay kind.
To win, Kai and the others will have to answer the question the corporation spent a fortune trying to bury. What is a person worth once you can copy them, edit them, and sell them a peace that is really an erasure?
Neon Ghosts is a standalone cyberpunk thriller about grief, memory, and the refusal to be smoothed into compliance. It is built for readers who like their neon futures with real weight underneath, in the tradition of Altered Carbon and Neuromancer. If you have ever wondered what happens to a soul once a corporation learns how to file it, this is your city.
Listen for the static underneath. That is where the living still are.
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