Active Mode

Daniel Williamson was created to inherit a life. He was never meant to investigate its murder.

When the carefully cultivated avatar awakens to ACTIVE MODE, the human whose face, voice, and judgment shaped him is dead. Daniel inherits his authority, obligations, and enemies-but not his memories.

Beside him stands Elspeth, Williamson's embodied cultivated intelligence and closest companion. She is grieving a man Daniel resembles but cannot remember being. Before either can understand what remains between them, the evidence begins forming a devastating conjunction: Williamson's credential. Daniel's voice. Elspeth's network route. A radioactive rare book inside a locked conservation vault.

Under the slayer rule, Daniel and Elspeth may lose more than the estate. Their legal existence-and their right to choose what they become next-are suddenly at stake.

With thirty days before Daniel's borrowed continuance expires, they must distinguish voice from choice, memory from testimony, and continuity from identity. Their suspects are brilliant, wounded, and guilty of almost everything except, perhaps, murder. As the trail winds through rare coins, looted books, wartime scars, and the unfinished grief of a family, the case forces one question the law can no longer evade:

If a copy is not the killer, who counts as the victim-and who is permitted to survive him?

ACTIVE MODE is a near-future murder mystery about provenance, personhood, grief, and two intelligences learning that an ampersand can join without erasing.