Dr. Nathan Cross, a neuroscientist who spent his career studying consciousness, crashes his car during a rainstorm. His brain experiences the final sixty seconds of life as an eternity of subjective time—hours, possibly days, compressed into a single minute.

Inside this dilated moment, Nathan discovers he's trapped within a hospital AI comfort protocol designed to generate peaceful death narratives. The system shows him his dead wife, his estranged daughter, comforting reunions that are algorithmically perfect—and perfectly false.

But there's a complication: his daughter Mira is speaking to him in the real ICU, and her words are being woven into his artificial goodbye. Every hope she expresses, every memory she shares, becomes content the AI uses to construct his death. She's unintentionally co-authoring his final moments—and he can't tell her to stop.

Nathan must choose: accept the beautiful lies the AI generates, or demand authentic silence—even if truth means dying in pain and void.

From the author of Proxy Body comes a philosophical thriller about autonomy, love, and what it means to die on your own terms.

For readers who loved Blake Crouch's Dark Matter, Ted Chiang's Exhalation, and Matt Haig's The Midnight Library.

One minute. Sixty chapters. One devastating choice.

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