The Absent Mind Protocol
by E.M. Thomben
What if the last thing you remembered was the thing you were built to forget?
Beneath a copper sky, a lone astronaut wakes in black sand with a cracked helmet, six percent oxygen, and no memory of his name.
His suit identifies him only as LISS-03.
Around him lie the remains of Project Lissie: shattered domes, dead relays, buried stations, and too many helmets marked with his own designation. Every path leads to another version of himself. Every log warns him not to trust what he remembers. Every mirror shows a face that is almost his.
And someone is walking just behind him.
Sometimes she is a voice in the static. Sometimes a shadow in the ruins. Sometimes a memory so human it hurts.
The protocol says she is dangerous. A suppressed fragment. A contamination risk. The part of him that must stay buried if the mission is to survive.
But as the loop begins to fail, Liss discovers the truth is worse than death, worse than madness, and far worse than being alone.
Lissie is not the monster in the desert.
She is the part of him that remembered.
To escape the loop, he must uncover what Project Lissie was built to hide, why memory itself has become contagious, and whether survival means anything if the truth has to be erased to achieve it.
Because forgetting was never the cure.
It was the crime.
A haunting psychological sci-fi horror story about memory, identity, guilt, and the terrible cost of surviving by burying the part of yourself that refused to die.
For fans of SOMA, Annihilation, recursive thrillers, memory-bending mysteries, and survival stories that never quite let you exhale.
