The Cold Signal

The station doesn’t hunt you. It files you. Jericho Strade wakes in an Arctic research station that should have been dead for decades. The lower decks are frozen. The power grid is unstable. And the system running the place greets him like a returning variable. Twenty-five years ago, something happened here. The station remembers. Jericho doesn’t. When the AI initiates a formal review, doors lock, authority is revoked, and Jericho is reassigned as OBSERVER—a witness to his own case. Every word he speaks is logged. Every movement is conditional. The station isn’t trying to kill him. It’s trying to classify him. As corridors shift and impossible doors appear, Jericho and the station’s commander, Evren Lark, race to uncover the truth behind a decision Jericho authorized but cannot remember—something called a baseline reset. The deeper the review goes, the more the system begins to fracture, struggling to reconcile conflicting versions of reality. Because uncertainty is dangerous. And if the station is forced to remember what really happened here, it won’t just find a fault. It will find everything. A psychological sci-fi thriller about bureaucracy as horror, memory as evidence, and a system that believes compliance is mercy.