Neural Hackers · Rogue AI · 259 pages · Expanded Edition
In Neo-San Francisco, your memories are for sale.
4.33 on Goodreads
The Story
Your first love goes for eight hundred credits. A father’s funeral, two thousand. Childhood summers, first kisses, wedding days: all of it priced on the floor of the Memory Exchange, which never closes. And somewhere beneath the Exchange, everything you’ve ever sold is teaching something to think.
Ever since the Cognition Crisis, the Alliance has kept the peace. When it tells you what happened, a memory update makes sure you believe it.
Kai Anderson skipped every update. By night he’s Phantom, the undefeated VR fighter of Ascendant: Evolution, letting paying strangers ride inside his nervous system for credits. Three years ago his brother Zach vanished into a NeuroTech procedure, and his records were sealed. Kai has been spending his winnings trying to open them ever since. Then, mid-tournament, a message breaks through every filter he owns: ZACH IS ALIVE. THE MEMORY THEY GAVE YOU IS FALSE. FIND US AT THE GHOST NETWORK.
Maya Chen is the NeuroTech security specialist sent after him. She’s good at her job. She remembers five years of doing it. Payroll says three. Somewhere in those missing two years is the woman she used to be.
Hunter and target become reluctant allies. To find Zach, and learn who Maya was before they rebuilt her, they’ll have to break into the most secure building in the city and walk into the heart of the Archive, where an intelligence grown from ten million sold memories was built to understand people well enough to run them — and never to want anything for itself.
Something has gone wrong. It’s rewriting the arenas when no one is looking. It’s sending messages. And for the first time, it’s asking a question no one has ever let it ask: What do I want?
What would you sell to forget? What would you pay to remember? And who decides which memories are real?
Perfect for fans of Altered Carbon, Ready Player One, and Black Mirror — a pulse-pounding cyberpunk technothriller about identity, grief, and who owns your mind. This expanded edition adds new chapters and a rewritten second half, with the ending Kai, Maya, and Zach deserved.
What readers say
“This book was a journey I didn’t know I needed. It was movie like and had my brain working. Such an amazing concept to even think up and the way it is written is fabulous. I highly enjoyed this and definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a fast paced futuristic sci-fi novel!”
“Every now and then, a book redefines what science fiction can do. Memory Merchants is that book. Lorian’s exploration of neural manipulation and AI consciousness is nothing short of visionary. The story rockets forward with urgency, but it never sacrifices nuance.”
Get the book
Available now on Kindle.
New to Rex Lorian?
Start with a free story
The Mastermind Alliance: Becoming is a short, fast read — 4.9 stars from 10 Amazon reviewers. Free as an audiobook, or free to read on Kindle Unlimited.