Free Sample
The Forgetting Protocol
A Novel of Neural Drift and Inheritance
by Dana Kowalski
Chapter 1: The Pattern Recognition
The emergency call came through at 3:47 AM on a Thursday, which meant Elena had been asleep for exactly ninety minutes. She knew this with the precision of someone who had trained herself to wake at the precise moment her phone vibrated—a trick of attention that felt less like a skill than an affliction, the body learning to resent rest.
"We have a positive correlation," Marcus said. His voice carried that particular frequency of excitement she'd learned to recognize over fifteen years: the sound of a prediction validating itself in real time. "IRIS flagged an individual at 11:23 PM last night. Suicide risk assessment: 94.7 percent probability of attempt within eight hours."
Elena was already out of bed, reaching for the cardigan draped across her desk chair. The apartment was dark except for the city glow filtering through the windows—that perpetual urban twilight that never quite became night.
"And?" she asked, though she already knew the answer. Marcus wouldn't have called otherwise.
"Behavioral intervention team reached the subject at 6:15 AM. They found him on his apartment balcony. Fifteen stories up. They're saying if IRIS had flagged him even two hours later..." He trailed off. They both understood what silence meant in this context.
Elena's hand stilled on the cardigan. Through the window, the city was beginning its slow transformation from black to the particular shade of gray that preceded dawn. A siren wailed somewhere in the distance—ambulance or fire truck, impossible to distinguish.
"Send