A Singular Witness
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Quinn wants to escape her claustrophobic hometown after her father dies unexpectedly from a rare parasitic infection, and an internship filming feed in cities around the world for a software company developing a virtual running game seems like her ticket to run.
When it turns out the company is owned by the father of a boy whose motives are murky, her departure leaves her best friend Toby feeling jealous and betrayed back home. As a research assistant for a local professor who believes parasitic infections may be being utilized as a biological weapon, Toby starts piecing together clues that suggest Quinn's father was murdered; a murder connected to the disappearance years before of his own father, a world-famous biomedical engineer on the cusp of a cure for infertility.
Toby's investigation circles back to a shadowy pharmaceutical executive he discovers is stalking Quinn, and creates a game of cat and mouse where Toby faces either losing Quinn, or altering her very existence to save her; even as he grapples with the layers of meaning in the last question Quinn's dying father asked him: "Are you real?"
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