Owen Black

What if you could pay someone else to get sick for you? When her teenage brother’s kidneys begin to fail, graduate researcher Nina Reeves runs out of options. Transplants take years. Money runs out faster. And the system offers no mercy for families who can’t afford to wait. Then she discovers the Medical Proxy Program. For enough money, someone can undergo treatment in your place. Chemotherapy. Experimental trials. The pain, the risk, the long-term damage - outsourced to bodies that need the cash more than they need safety. Nina signs the contract. What follows is not heroism, but endurance. Twelve weeks of poison. A body slowly breaking down. A system that calls desperation “consent” and suffering “data.” When another proxy dies and the truth begins to surface, Nina is forced to confront a brutal question: How many lives justify the destruction of one? PROXY PATIENT is a harrowing, near-future science-fiction novel about medical ethics, economic coercion, and the cost of survival in a world where pain can be bought and sold. It is a story about love pushed past its limits - and the price paid when the system decides whose bodies are expendable.

When consequences become optional, someone else pays them. Marcus Webb needs money. Fast. When a legal substitution firm offers him $75,000 to stand in for a tech executive accused of vehicular manslaughter, the contract is clear: he will appear in court, face the jury, absorb the scrutiny - and then disappear. The client stays offshore. The proxy takes the weight. As the trial unfolds, Marcus realizes he isn’t just representing another man. He’s becoming the public face of a crime, the target of outrage, and the stand-in for guilt that money can’t erase. When buried evidence surfaces too late to change the verdict, the truth becomes irrelevant - and the system closes ranks. The Stand-In is the first novel in The Substitute Lives, a near-future thriller series about legalized identity transfer, moral displacement, and what happens when accountability can be outsourced. If someone can suffer in your place... Who are you afterward? And who are they?