2078 - Protocol Zero

In a city that can correct its own past, the most dangerous thing you can own is a contradiction.Bucharest, 2078. Nobody sleeps badly anymore. Nobody grieves longer than is useful. For forty years, a system called Mnemosyne has quietly managed what people carry, isolating the memory of a stillbirth, softening the year a marriage ended, lifting the guilt that survives the thing it was attached to. Almost no one was forced. Nineteen million people asked.A novel about memory as public infrastructure, about the difference between forgetting and being administered, and about the quiet arithmetic by which ordinary people become complicit one reasonable step at a time.Protocol Zero is a science-fiction novel with no villains and no clean exit and its most frightening idea is not that a machine took our past, but that we asked it to, and were grateful, and would ask again.For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro, Jennifer Egan and Stanislaw Lem: a book about the last thing we own outright, and how easily we hand it over.