Factory Reset

About this book

Engineer Ahmed Rashad builds his life on love and trust until discovering his wife Sherine's betrayal drives him to murder. Before his death sentence can be carried out, he is transferred to an experimental institution where execution is only the beginning of a far more disturbing process. The center promises rehabilitation through the complete erasure of memory. Ahmed is renamed Youssef, medicated, monitored, and placed among other offenders who have been stripped of their pasts. Yet memory proves harder to destroy than a set of files. When he sees Mariam—a woman who may be Sherine under another identity—old names, nightmares, and bodily recognition begin to break through. Factory Reset is a psychological and dystopian thriller about guilt, identity, coercion, and the ethics of enforced forgetting. It asks whether a person can truly begin again without memory, and whether an old love can cross the barrier of oblivion only to awaken the crime once more.