Everything We Lost Is Still There
Everything We Lost Is Still There
A New Standalone Science Fiction Thriller by Ryan Mercer
Some things are gone forever.
At least, they are supposed to be.
Nora Vale spends her days restoring damaged objects at Chicago’s Halcyon Museum. She can clean soot from a photograph, stabilize a cracked painting, and preserve what remains after fire, neglect, or time has done its worst.
What she cannot restore is Theo, her husband, who died fourteen months earlier in a suspicious car crash.
While testing an experimental quantum-imaging system, Nora opens a doorway into an empty version of Chicago. The streets, buildings, museums, and homes are almost exactly the same, but no people or other sentient beings exist there.
The empty city contains something even more impossible.
Everything Nora’s world has lost, stolen, burned, deleted, or destroyed still exists there.
When Nora travels to the site of Theo’s crash, she finds his destroyed blue source phone preserved inside the wreckage. The phone may contain the evidence he died trying to protect, including information that could expose one of the country's most powerful men.
Bringing it home comes with a cost.
Every object recovered from the empty world erases the human memories connected to it. A lost wedding ring can be returned, but the proposal it represents may disappear. A destroyed work of art can be restored, but the people who loved it may forget why it mattered.
As Nora searches Theo’s phone, she begins losing pieces of him. His laugh. His face. Their private jokes. Their arguments. The complicated life they shared.
To uncover the truth about Theo’s death, Nora may have to forget the man she is trying to avenge.
About the Book
Everything We Lost Is Still There is a standalone contemporary science fiction thriller about grief, memory, parallel worlds, corporate power, and the dangerous belief that recovering something lost can make a person whole again.
The story combines an eerie alternate Chicago, a mystery surrounding a journalist’s death, and an impossible moral choice. It is written for readers who enjoy accessible speculative fiction with emotional stakes, psychological suspense, and a complete ending.
The novel is currently in development. We'll post additional details and release information here as they become available.