After surviving a car accident he doesn't fully remember, Conner Howard begins to lose time.
His credit cards are used in places he's never been. Security footage shows him living a second life. And inside his mind, another version of himself is waking up-one that remembers things Conner never lived.
The group at Suite 108 calls it continuity: a process that promises to preserve consciousness beyond death by transferring it from one body to the next. But Conner discovers the truth. Continuity doesn't save minds. It absorbs them-reducing lives to memory, and memory to data.
Refusing to be erased, Conner forms an impossible alliance with his double. Together, they attempt something no one else has ever survived: coexistence.
But the system that created them was never designed to let fragments remain separate.
And as new survivors begin to fracture, Conner must prove that identity is more than a pattern-or risk becoming nothing more than the next echo in an endless chain.
THE EMPTY CHAIR is a literary science fiction novel about consciousness, identity, and the cost of survival in a world where death is no longer the end-only transformation.
For readers of Blake Crouch, Ted Chiang, Never Let Me Go, and Annihilation.