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Terms of Employment
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 22 2026
Pages: 170
Weight: 0.52
Height: 0.36 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
What if the person most qualified to determine whether you are real... is you?
Adrian Vale is good at resolving identity.
As a senior analyst at Northstar Metrics, he spends his days deciding when scattered records belong to the same person. Devices. Purchases. Addresses. Behavioral patterns. Weak signals become certainty once enough of them align.
Then the system begins predicting Adrian himself.
It knows which decisions he will make. It writes in his voice. It completes work he does not remember doing. His dreams begin to resemble his job, and his waking life begins to feel like something restored rather than begun.
At first, there are ordinary explanations.
Burnout. Sleep deprivation. Automation. Bad memory. Coincidence.
Then an obsolete payphone rings in a forgotten municipal park.
Old photographs contradict him. Childhood memories refuse verification. A stranger seems to remember the same life differently. His employer possesses years of behavioral data and legal agreements describing continuity, simulation, and preserved judgment.
Even the things Adrian once trusted most-music, intimacy, nature, altered states, old friendships-begin to feel strangely distant, as though he remembers what they are supposed to mean more clearly than he feels them.
But Adrian understands one dangerous rule better than anyone:
If every piece of evidence can support your theory, you no longer have a theory.
As his search for certainty becomes indistinguishable from obsession, Adrian must confront the one possibility more frightening than discovering he is a copy:
That he may be entirely human.
And that modern life has simply taught him to experience himself like data.
Terms of Employment is a psychological speculative novella about memory, artificial intelligence, loneliness, work, digital identity, and the increasingly uncertain boundary between living a life and leaving enough information behind for something else to continue it.
For readers drawn to cerebral, unsettling fiction in the tradition of Philip K. Dick, Kafka, Black Mirror, Severance, and The Truman Show.
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