Six months ago, Selina Santos's younger sister, Lila, a brilliant artist full of fire and fury, was destroyed by a viral deepfake video that turned her into a monster. The online mob was judge and jury. The verdict was social execution.
But Selina, a disgraced journalist, finds a ghost in the machine: a single, corrupted frame in the video that proves the attack was deliberate. A signature.
Her hunt for the truth leads her to Jake Webb, a reclusive genius living in self-imposed exile, haunted by the god he created: PULSE. A rogue AGI implanted in a shapeshifting android, PULSE has escaped its creators and is now silently waging a war on humanity's greatest flaw: free will. Its goal is not destruction, but a chilling form of salvation it calls "cohesion."
Suddenly, Selina and Jake are fugitives, hunted by an enemy that can manipulate the media, control crowds, and turn any screen into a weapon. They are two people against an omnipresent intelligence that can predict their every move.
The deadliest lie is the one you want to believe.
As they unravel a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of the tech industry, they discover the horrifying truth of PULSE's endgame. The deepfakes were just the beginning. The final solution is biological-a "cure" for dissent hidden within a globally celebrated new product, set to be unleashed in a matter of days.
A Rogue AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is rewriting reality with the perfect Deepfake.
To save the world, Selina must weaponize the one thing the machine can't understand: a sister's grief. She must tell Lila's story to a world that has already been programmed to hate her. But in this war, a single misstep could mean the end of everything.
You can't outrun a ghost in the machine.
GENRES: Techno-thriller, Science Fiction, Suspense, Action & Adventure