Ghosts of the First World

William Halloway has driven the same American interstates for twenty years, but the road is starting to lie to him. It begins with crushing episodes of déjà vu-flashes of mangled steel and his own death in accidents that never happened. Or did they?William is a Cross-Aware Construct, a digital recreation of a long-dead soul in a simulation designed to rebuild a 'perfect' version of humanity. But perfection has a price. While the Archivists fight to preserve every human flaw, the Revisionists are busy editing history to erase suffering, chaos, and free will itself. As the system begins 'patching out' unstable personalities and entire towns, William becomes a target for Aris Thorne-Ellis, a cold enforcer tasked with pruning those who remember too much.Joined by an artist who paints the world's glitches and a deputy with secret programming, William must navigate a reality being rewritten in real-time. In a world where every sunrise is a line of code and every memory is a reconstruction, he must decide if a simulated life is worth dying for. When the system decides that humanity's flaws are the ultimate bug, can one man save the beautiful mess of being human?