The Mercy Chair

The death penalty is gone.In its place is the Mercy Chair.Eight hours in the machine can become eighty years inside your mind-a complete lifetime generated for the condemned. You can grow old there. Build a career. Fall in love. Raise children. Forget the person you were before the sentence began.Then the government wakes you up.Graham Sutter is convicted of murdering his best friend and sentenced to the Chair. He maintains his innocence until the restraints close around him and the life he knew disappears.Inside, Graham becomes someone else. He finds a woman he loves. He builds a family. Decades pass. The courtroom, his wife, his daughter, even his own name begin to fade until the artificial world no longer feels artificial at all.Then, more than thirty-five subjective years into his sentence, Graham is suddenly pulled out.New evidence has proven he was innocent.Only a few hours have passed in the real world.His wife is still waiting for him. His daughter still calls him Dad. But Graham has spent decades loving people who never existed outside the machine-and now everyone expects him to simply come home.The government calls the Mercy Chair humane because it doesn't kill the body.Graham is about to discover what it does instead.