AUGMENTED REALITY

Every morning someone on his street holds a whole conversation with a man standing in an empty yard — and forgets it ninety seconds later. Harlan is inside the entire time, behind locked glass, holding a cup of coffee. He can put his voice where his body isn't. He can make a dog sit from forty feet. He has no memory of the four months that made him this way.

Elena Marsh does. She was a neuropsychologist at Ashgrove Behavioral, the private contractor that pulled Harlan out of a wreck on Highway 421 and turned him into an experiment — and she is the one who put his name on the list.

Now the suppression field they buried in his head is failing, and it isn't failing quietly. It is bleeding into eleven houses full of ordinary people, taking a little more of them every day.