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Totality
Brendan Lyons, author
What is man, oh Lord? And what do we owe God in receipt for our body and soul? As we barrel forward in medical and scientific progress, the answer trends increasingly toward ‘nothing.’
Enter the ‘switchover,’ the process by which a human being’s mind is transferred into a genetically perfected body, cloned specifically for them. Held up as the pinnacle of medical science by its creators and embraced by the insurance industry, more and more doctors and plans are making the process a prerequisite for care and coverage. But is the nation moving too quickly toward enshrining this emerging technology as vital to health care? And can such a radical process be rolled out so quickly without missing potentially damaging side effects?
These are the questions that plague Tim Plesac, the primary investor in the early stages of the switchover’s development and the very first successful human patient. It has been a decade since his switchover, but now that the widespread rollout of the process is on the horizon, he has begun to question not only the science but also the ethics. And as he delves deeper into these questions with help from his wife, Ali, the little voice in his head only grows…
Meanwhile, a strange new phenomenon has begun to plague the northeast corridor of the nation: a dozen experimental military time pods have been stolen, and suddenly people have begun to come back in time. Their mission: to kill their past selves. These ‘plurals’ appear, somehow driven mad in the future, with the intent to end their pain by never allowing it to begin. But why? What else could be motivating the attacks? And could there be a link to the looming switchover? Nick Jeffrey and his wife Hannah were content to ignore these questions until Nick comes face to face with a plural in his own office. And what this man from the future tells him will change his once simple life for good.
Totality is a gripping story of a divine mission perverted by earthly desire and the end result of the commodification of health care and human life.