Zero-Identity Freedom
(Book I of the Memory Theatre Meltdown)
In a future where identity is assigned, not found, and memory is no longer private, Tully—a quiet scavenger of sound, rust, and half-forgotten culture—finds himself marked for Assessment.
He is led into the Spindle Array, a vast intelligence lattice masked as a civic sanctuary. There are no windows. No clocks. Only echoes. Assessment becomes a descent, each corridor peeling away what the system calls “unnecessary narrative.”
Within its halls he encounters ghosts of memory, coded archetypes, and fractured mirrors of the self. Under the soft hum of obsolete machines and whispered data, he begins to resist—not with weapons, but with pattern, ritual, and noise.
Guided by a masked figure known only as the Synth Shaman, Tully undergoes a rite not meant for survival, but for