The Voss Claim
Seven months after he died, Tom s Voss walked into the registry office and asked for a form.
His survey ship was lost in a deep-space wave-field collapse. His death certificate is on file. His wife has been a widow for seven months. Now he stands at a counter on Vantaa Station, calm and polite, asking to be declared alive.
The case goes to HELIOS Unit 09, a nonhuman investigator built to observe, classify, and file. The biometrics come back a 99.97 percent match. By every test the law recognizes, this man is Tom s Voss.
But HELIOS looks deeper than the law requires. Beneath the biology, in the layer of physics that lets matter hold together, something about Tom s Voss has been written over. He remembers a caf that closed more than two years ago. His wife recovers her composure too quickly. And part of his death record was quietly erased eleven days after he was declared dead.
The law gives the claim thirty days. In that time, a director wants the file closed, a disgraced physicist's suppressed research starts to read like a warning, and the corridors of Vantaa Station begin to change shape.
Proving Tom s Voss is alive is the easy part. Finding out who brought him back, and what they are practicing for, is the case.
The Voss Claim is the first HELIX Cases novel: a science fiction mystery about identity, evidence, and a universe that may be editing its own records.
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