THE MACHINE DOES NOT REVEAL TRUTH. IT PRODUCES CONFIDENCE.

Detective Caleb Smith believes in the data. In a city governed by the Compassion Protocol, neural synchronization has replaced the uncertainty of interrogation. Strap on the band, sync with a suspect, and feel their guilt. No more bias. No more doubt. Just the raw, high-resolution evidence of the human heart.

But some signals are lies.

When a young woman is murdered in the foothills, the machine red-lines for a terrified father whose panic is indistinguishable from a confession. But for the witness who found the body, the readout is a perfect, chilling flatline. Absolute calm. Absolute innocence.

Caleb clears a predator. He destroys a victim.

Now the bodies are dropping again, and the machine has no answers. Hidden in the protocol's blind spot is a "Null Signal": a killer the technology was never built to see, a man so hollow that the system mistakes his void for virtue. To stop the slaughter, Caleb must go rogue, sacrifice his badge, and risk his own emotional baseline to hunt a monster invisible to every instrument except the one the machine was designed to replace: human instinct.

In the search for truth, a perfect score is the ultimate deception.

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