About this book:

In a near-future city recovering from a catastrophic outbreak, society is defined by the physical and psychological scars left on its survivors. The novel follows Maren, a self-taught prosthetic engineer operating an unlicensed workshop beneath a bridge. Eschewing the sleek, expensive models of the corporate world, Maren builds "aftermarket" limbs from scavenged drone parts and transit scrap. The story centers on the uneasy relationship between the body and technology, particularly through the lens of "phantom limbs"—the persistent neural echoes of what was lost. Maren’s work is not just about mechanical repair, but about restoring autonomy to people who have been marginalized by a broken healthcare system.

The plot intensifies when Maren discovers a dark secret within the city's premier medical provider, Apex Systems, led by the clinical Dr. Aris. While Apex offers "restoration"—high-end, osseointegrated limbs that feel and move like the originals—the hardware comes with a high price: a permanent neural link to a central server that harvests patient data and allows for remote deactivation. Maren, alongside a resourceful courier named Yael and a young scout named Kofi, realizes that these advanced prosthetics are actually tools of surveillance and control, designed to turn the disabled population into a captive, optimized workforce for an external corporate network.

The conflict reaches a climax as Maren develops an open-source "kill command" to sever the corporate leash and return control to the patients. This leads to a dangerous infiltration of a fortified data facility, where Maren and their allies face off against "combat chassis"—human-machine hybrids stripped of their will. The mission successfully disrupts the local network, but it reveals a much larger global infrastructure that continues to watch the city from orbit. The act of liberation forces Maren to confront the ethical weight of their own actions, as they struggle with the responsibility of having rewritten the bodies of hundreds of strangers without their prior consent.

In the aftermath, the story pivots to a message of community-driven resilience. Maren chooses to publish their technical protocols and ethical frameworks as open-source documentation, ensuring that the knowledge to maintain and free the human body cannot be monopolized by any single authority. The novel concludes with the establishment of a "Clinic of Second Chances," where the focus shifts from high-tech dependence to "aftermarket humanity"—a world where being "whole" is defined by the freedom to choose one's own path, maintained by hand, one bolt and one honest conversation at a time.