Dean Archer

On a routine audit, federal records analyst Nate Mercer discovers something that shouldn’t exist: a missing day. March 17th, 2024 has been erased from every federal database in the United States. No transactions. No logs. No record that Thursday ever happened. But forty-three people in a small Pennsylvania town remember living through it. Following the anomaly leads Nate into the Department of Lost Days - a government agency that officially doesn’t exist, tasked with documenting temporal discrepancies the rest of the system quietly corrects and forgets. What begins as a bureaucratic mystery becomes an investigation into Project Chronos, a classified program capable of erasing days from collective memory. As Nate uncovers the scope of the program, he realizes something worse: one of the erased days belongs to him. The Department of Lost Days is a grounded, cerebral techno-thriller about memory manipulation, institutional secrecy, and the terrifying power of administrative control over reality itself. Blending conspiracy fiction with near-future science, it explores what happens when governments stop hiding the truth - and start deleting it. For readers who enjoy slow-burn sci-fi thrillers, government conspiracy novels, and high-concept speculative fiction rooted in realism.