KJMinuetto
What if the only way to save yourself from pain was to kill the part of you that feels it?
Stefano and Andrea invented the Cluster: a revolutionary technology capable of mapping and materializing unwanted emotional responses. To eliminate them, there is only one way: face them in a lucid limbo and kill them. It works. The memories remain, the pain vanishes. But every extraction leaves a shadow, an insatiable thirst that no water can quench.
When the powerful Haeris corporation, founded by Shia Kestrel, requisitions their project for a space colonization mission under the leadership of Vera, a French ex-soldier, the happiness algorithm becomes a tool for bio-medical control. To eradicate human fragility, Haeris is ready for anything.
Within the isolated walls of the Chesterfield military base, science turns into horror. Vera must face the trauma of abandoning her daughter. While Stefano slips into blind obsession, going so far as to map love itself to tear it from his chest, Andrea falls in love with Alessia-an unstable test subject in whom the extractions have awakened something distorted. A Parasitic Cluster: an alternative identity, violent and unpredictable.
In a hall of mirrors featuring obsessive phobias, neural viruses that punish strong emotions, and passions born on the edge of the abyss, love is no longer a salvation. It is the anomaly that can break the game of control. Or condemn them all.