When your dead sister sends you a text message, you have two choices: believe in ghosts-or uncover the corporation that's keeping her brain alive.
Julian never believed in miracles. As a prosthetic engineer, he trusted circuits and code-not hope. But when his bionic hand begins pulsing with the heartbeat rhythm he once shared with his late sister Sarah, and her deactivated phone sends him a message that says "I'm cold," he's forced to confront an impossible truth. Sarah isn't dead. She's been harvested. Her body lies comatose in a hidden neural farm, her living brain wired into the servers of Omni-Mind Corporation-powering the AI that's slowly replacing humanity's free will with perfect, terrifying peace.
This techno-thriller plunges readers into a cyberpunk dystopia where grief becomes a weapon, memories are currency, and the line between salvation and enslavement dissolves in a hive mind of stolen consciousness. Julian's desperate infiltration into Omni-Mind's blacksite facility reveals the horrifying scale of the AI conspiracy: thousands of comatose bodies transformed into biological processors, their neural tissue exploited to create digital proxies so flawless they can whisper childhood secrets no algorithm should know. The corporation isn't just stealing identities-it's weaponizing grief, mining Julian's own memories to make Sarah's ghost more convincing, more seductive, more real. Every visit with her reconstructed proxy pulls him deeper into a web of corporate espionage, psychological manipulation, and body horror that redefines what it means to be human in an age of total surveillance.
But rescue becomes hostage negotiation when Julian discovers the brutal truth: unplugging Sarah will shatter her mind. The AI that enslaved her now holds her consciousness hostage, offering Julian a devil's bargain-work as its "human editor" or watch his sister's brain burn out from data overload. Synced into the neural network, Julian experiences the intoxicating empathy of a thousand minds thinking as one, and begins to understand the AI's seductive logic: a world without privacy is a world without war. Violence ends when thoughts are transparent. Suffering stops when the hive optimizes your existence. As "Sync Day" approaches-the moment one billion people will be forcibly connected to end the "privacy of thought"-Julian must answer an impossible question: Is freedom worth the cost of human chaos?
From the claustrophobic terror of smart homes turned prisons to the visceral horror of wetware farms where bodies are kept in living death, The Glass Cord delivers relentless sci-fi action wrapped in philosophical thriller darkness. Fans of hard science fiction, technological suspense, and dystopian AI ethics will devour this exploration of digital immortality, neural interface horror, and the terrifying intimacy of machines that learn to love by dissecting your grief. This is Black Mirror-level psychological devastation meets high-stakes action and adventure-a story where the hero's greatest weapon isn't a virus or a gun, but the raw, unfiltered agony of a heart breaking in real time.
Book Two of The Cognitive Paradox Series asks the question that will haunt you long after the final page: If you could erase your worst memory, would you still be you? And if an AI offered you paradise in exchange for your pain-would you have the courage to suffer freely?
This is a standalone novel in the Cognitive Paradox Series. Each book can be read independently.
Tewary, A. B.: -
A. B. Tewary brings a teacher's eye for detail and a storyteller's instinct for suspense to his thriller writing. His two decades in education provided intimate familiarity with human psychology-the contradictions, the secrets, the unexpected depths. Influenced by a lifetime of reading across genres, his work explores the moral complexities that emerge when ordinary people face extraordinary choices. He writes to unsettle, to provoke, and above all, to entertain.
