Ghosts in Static
Alex Von Schulze
Type: Beta project
Genre: Science fiction, horror, literary
Word count: 65,000
Warnings: Graphic violence, swearing
Someone erased Jonah Cole. Left him in an underground bar with nothing but a frequency screaming in his skull and hands that know how to kill. He must find a woman named Rose through a city where the poor get processed and addicts pay to die in other people’s bodies. She’s running out of time. He might be the reason why.
Jonah Cole wakes in an underground bar with no memory, a name that means nothing, and a frequency in his skull that won’t stop screaming. The city above exists under a dome. The air outside is poison. Inside, a corporation called Ark offers “sanctuary” to the desperate—what they’re really doing is harvesting consciousness, processing people into infrastructure so the rich can live forever. Bioluminescent growth called Hemlock chokes every surface, and in underground parlors, addicts pay to experience other people’s deaths through neural links called the Shuffle.
Cole was one of them. Before someone erased him. Now a pregnant woman named Rose is being forced into the machine, and he has days to find her before she’s processed. He doesn’t remember her. But his body does—the way his chest tightens at her name, the way his hands know routes his mind has forgotten. A sci-fi noir about memory, addiction, and what we sacrifice to save what we’ve already lost.
Alex Von Schulze is a speculative fiction author exploring the boundaries of memory, identity, and technology. Crafting immersive sci-fi and horror narratives that challenge reality. His research background is in molecular biology—specifically, how proteins misfold and aggregate in neurodegenerative disease. The line between science and fiction, it turns out, is thinner than it looks.
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