One experimental drug. One last chance at freedom.
Feiyu “Theo” Smith doesn’t remember murdering four people. The evidence collected by the DNA-processing drone says otherwise. Now he’s languishing in San Quentin with no contact from family or his former fiancé for three long years. It’s 2044, and in the dystopian reality of New California Republic, condemned inmates can volunteer for experimental drug testing to avoid lethal injection.
Researchers claim the revolutionary therapy known as the Isochron Treatment will rewrite the man’s immune response. But the vivid, horrific nightmares he experiences while under the drug's effects lead him to suspect it may be rewriting his past, forcing him to remember things he does not wish to remember. It’s either that, or he’s going insane. Or maybe, just maybe, the drug’s main side-effect is not nightmares, but time travel.
This was a really likable and somewhat chilling novella. The main idea here is about dropping us into this dystopian landscape and realizing the changes here regarding how the different police system operates and what lands our main character in jail, the way it spreads to include the special treatment option that sets him up to be experimented on for the sake of looking into the past that he can't remember is a wholly enjoyable way to get this going to a strong start. The way it expands on this type of scenario, where the change in how society operates and the new procedures employed to set everything in motion, becomes quite immersive over time and builds up the intrigue rather nicely.
By the time it moves into the more profound thriller aspects of everything regarding the twist about his past and the inability to connect to what happened in his past, this becomes quite fun, if not with the same impact as the original idea. With the more overt sci-fi elements coming into play, with the hallucinations of the incident in question making him question whether he forgot about the crime or never even committed it in the first place, this ends up taking the book into a somewhat fun time-travel effort that tries to paint a strange picture about everything happening around him, either the drug experiments or coming to terms with what he did. Overall, it is the one issue here striking against this one.
4.5/5
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