RESIDUE: The Behavioral

The program doesn't take anything from you. It only adds. Lieutenant Mara Venn is selected for the Morphic Corps — a classified military program that integrates soldiers with mission-specific biological frames, making them capable of operating in environments that kill unprotected soldiers in minutes. The results are exceptional. The cost is harder to measure. Because the frame doesn't just change what she can do. It changes how she thinks. What she notices. What she stops needing. The improvements arrive first. The losses come quietly, in the spaces between missions, in the slight recalibration of who she is when she isn't working. She doesn't notice. Her team does. A woman discovers that becoming extraordinary at something costs her the ordinary self she didn't know she was losing — until someone who loved her kept a record of who she used to be. And somewhere in a sealed section of a Vale Compact deep-bore installation, something that is not mechanical and not biological pulses with a regularity that the program has known about for a very long time. The program has an answer. Mara may not survive it intact. The Behavioral is the first novel in The RESIDUE series — for readers of Joe Haldeman, Ursula Le Guin, and John Scalzi's philosophical work.