The Junction Master's False Memory
A Near-Future Family Saga

About this book:

Arthur Vance built an empire on steel, sweat, and the unshakable certainty that a man who knows the rails knows the truth. But in the neon-lit corridors of a near-future Chicago, where maglevs whisper and algorithms route the world, the last patriarch of the Vance Transit Consortium sits on a forgotten platform, polishing a brass watch and reliving the night the sky tore open and lightning melted his dynasty into bankruptcy. His daughter Evelyn—corporate liquidator, keeper of the cold ledgers—arrives with a lethal kindness: the weather report from October 14, 2042, was clear. Sixty-two degrees. Not a cloud in the sky.

What follows is a masterful excavation of a family buried beneath its own mythology. As Evelyn forces the estate's final closure, the Vance siblings—Victor, the architect of the automated grid; Marcus, the ghost in the machine; and Arthur, the switchman who refuses to let go of the lever—circle a secret that has festered for decades. The "act of God" that destroyed them wasn't weather. It was a choice. And someone in the family made it.

Spanning from the swamp-borne grit of the High-Speed Line's construction to the sterile boardrooms where a birthright was sold for parts, *The Junction Master's False Memory* is a saga of blood and ballast, of code versus copper, and of the stories we tell ourselves to survive the wreckage. In the tradition of *The Corrections* and *Station Eleven*, this is a novel about the tracks we lay, the switches we throw, and the terrifying moment the signal changes—and you realize you've been reading the wrong timetable your whole life.