The deeper you search for yourself, the easier you are to find.

Book One of The Nonlocal Self Series

The deeper you search for yourself, the easier you are to find.

Elara Reed has never been able to picture anything in her mind.

No faces. No memories. No imagined worlds. Close her eyes and there is only darkness.

But never silence.

For as long as she can remember, Elara's mind has sounded like a radio left on seek: a distant crowd of thoughts and almost-voices moving beneath the one signal she has always assumed belongs to her.

A former radio engineer now working in neural-interface technology, Elara has spent years quietly entertaining a theory she knows better than to say aloud:

What if the brain doesn't create thought? What if it receives it?

The question would be easier to dismiss if Elara's nights weren't impossible.

When she sleeps, the woman who cannot summon a single image while awake suddenly experiences other lives with terrifying clarity. Sight. Sound. Taste. Pain. Memory. She awakens inside strangers, trapped behind their eyes as a passenger while they move through moments she has never lived.

And whenever she finds a mirror, someone else is looking back.

As the boundary between waking thought and sleeping consciousness begins to thin, Elara starts questioning everything she once considered unquestionably hers: her ideas, her memories, her identity, even the voice in her own head.

If thoughts can be received, who owns an idea?

If consciousness can move, where does the self actually live?

And if Elara can find her way into someone else's mind...

what might eventually find its way into hers?

The closer she gets to an answer, the more dangerous the question becomes. Because the company building technology beside her is trying to access something it believes exists inside the human brain.

Elara is beginning to suspect they're looking in the wrong place.

And some discoveries don't belong to the person who makes them.

Some discoveries notice you back.