Return Incomplete
Thomas Rook used to fight wars through bodies millions of kilometres away. Now he repossesses them for a living.
A character-driven science-fiction novel about memory, identity, warfare and what happens when a human body becomes infrastructure.
The damage still belongs to you.
Distance has become negotiable. Ownership has not.
Some parts of the past do not stay buried.
In 2364, Concordance technology can carry enough of a human mind across the Solar System for a distant Frame to feel like flesh. Governments built soldiers around it. Corporations built industries. Everyone eventually found a way to put a price on the body at the other end.
Thomas Rook was one of the soldiers. Once a Cinder, he fought through bodies waiting millions of kilometres from the flesh he was born in. Now the programme is gone, his own body carries the damage, and Rook makes a living recovering Frames for lenders in London.
Then a carefully chosen recovery job leads him to buried military hardware tied to an operation he cannot remember.
The system recognises him.
Rook does not recognise what it remembers.
Far from Earth, independent salvager Ada Mercer and pilot Julian Cross recover an abandoned military body from a vessel whose history has been deliberately erased. The Crown wants it back. Other people are willing to kill for it.
As their paths converge, Rook is forced towards a past he thought he had survived and towards a question the people who built him would rather leave unanswered:
Return Incomplete is the first novel in The Continuity Cycle, a far-future science-fiction series about memory, identity, loyalty and the ownership of the human self.
Chapter One: Recovery
Lower Clapton, London. 05:41. Rook's day begins with a stolen medical printer, a broken lift and a Frame somebody has decided no longer belongs to the man inside it.
The first impact came through the wall behind his bed as a dull thump. The second brought a woman's voice, sharpened by chemicals and lack of sleep. By the third, Rook was upright with one hand on the floor before the rest of him had agreed he was awake.
He stopped there.
There was no weapon under the bed. There had not been for six years. His hand had still gone to the place where one ought to have been.
The story continues.
Return Incomplete begins Thomas Rook's story. Book Two, What Remains, continues directly from its ending.
- Book One · Return Incomplete
- Book Two · What Remains
- Book Three · The First Machine · forthcoming
- Book Four · All Distance Ends · forthcoming
Concordance changed that. The Continuity Cycle follows the political, military and personal consequences of turning human presence into infrastructure.
Explore The Continuity Cycle