Description
Miles Carver is a data recovery specialist. He works in a spare room in a town that was a village thirty years ago, recovering data from damaged drives: wedding photos from dropped enclosures, business records from water-damaged servers, the ordinary residue of lives that have encountered physics. The solicitor's email is routine: recover data from a drive retrieved from a fatal car accident, all recovered material to be returned in full, the deceased has no known next of kin. Miles has done this work before. He does it with the same precision he brings to everything. Then he finds the video files. They're dated six days after the accident. After the woman died. And in them, she's alive—sitting in a room, looking at the camera, giving five specific instructions to whoever finds this drive. *Null* is psychological horror about data, memory, and the question of what survives us. It follows Miles as he works through the instructions left by a dead woman—Claire Sall, 34, fatal at scene—who somehow recorded messages after her death, who somehow knew she was dead while she was recording them, and who is waiting, with patient specificity, for someone to do exactly what she's asking. The novel unfolds in three acts: the recovery and the discovery of the anomalous files; the investigation into Claire's life and death and what she was doing in her final weeks; and finally the instructions themselves—what they ask, what they accomplish, and what it means to be the person carrying them out. Miles is not a conventional protagonist. He approaches the impossible the way he approaches everything: with documentation, verification, and a determination to fit the evidence into frameworks that weren't designed for it. He makes tea. He checks the sector maps. He notes the timestamp discrepancy and proposes possible technical explanations and watches them fail one by one. He is a man who has built his life around the principle that data is data—recoverable or not, intact or not, but alwa
About the Author
Miles Carver is the author of "Null" and other works.
