The Composite of Maria Gerrick

Maria Gerrick has spent most of her life believing that medicine gave her a second chance.

Her father died from the same inherited disease that nearly killed her. After his death, her mother disappeared, leaving Maria to be raised by her father's aunt and uncle. Years of treatment and multiple organ transplants eventually gave her something she had never expected: a healthy life, a husband, and the possibility of children of her own.

Then a routine medical test reveals something impossible.

Maria's body contains the genetic signatures of several different people.

The discovery draws her into a medical investigation that reaches far beyond her own history. What begins as a question about her transplants becomes a question about the technology that transformed modern medicine, the institutions that built it, and the lives that made it possible.

As Maria searches for the truth, she discovers that some of the most extraordinary advances in medicine may depend on secrets that society was never prepared to confront.

And now she has another problem.

She has embryos of her own.

For the first time, Maria must decide how far she is willing to go to protect the children she may one day have, even if the system that could save them is the same system she has come to fear.

How much of yourself can you owe to a system before survival becomes complicity?

The Clemency Engine

They told him prison would make him a better man. They didn't say he'd have to become someone else to survive it.

In a future where crime and dissent are treated the same, punishment isn't a cell. It's a simulated world, built for prisoners whose memories have been erased, where they earn their way back to themselves through empathy, humility, and change. The state calls it rehabilitation. It never tells you what "better" means. It just decides for you.

When his fifteen-year-old daughter is pulled from a protest, the law is clear: the family goes in together. Husband, wife, daughter. Three strangers waking up inside the same simulation, with no memory of each other, no memory of why they're there, and only one rule. Become better or stay.

Somehow, the husband finds the seam. He gets out. His simulated life and his real one come flooding back together, and with them, the truth of what the system actually does to the people inside it, and who it was really built to control.

Now he has to choose. Go back in with his memories intact, on the slim chance he can bring his family out whole. Or accept that the two people he loves most may already be walking a path that was never meant to let them leave.

Is a person made of their memories? Their feelings? Or the story that holds the two together?

A boy looking for a family.
A mystery buried across continents.
And a disease that may have no cure.

Benjamin has spent most of his childhood moving through the foster system. His parents, brilliant Nigerian scientists at Duke, died in an automobile accident when he was only two years old. He has learned not to expect people to stay.

Then he meets Marcus and his wife.

It starts with lunch. Then another lunch. A chaperoned dinner. Interviews. A temporary placement. Slowly, cautiously, Benjamin begins to believe that he may finally have found a home and possibly a family.

But Benjamin's new family carries secrets of its own.

When someone they love becomes dangerously ill, Benjamin is drawn into a mystery that reaches far beyond medicine. The search takes him from the United States to Nigeria and into a history older than anyone imagined, where ancient knowledge, family memory, and a strange biological force are connected in ways modern science cannot explain.

The deeper Benjamin goes, the more he realizes that the answers may have been waiting for his family all along.

But their search will eventually force them to confront a boundary that reaches beyond medicine, beyond science, and even beyond their humanity.

What happens when our desire to save the present gives us the power to violate the past?