Dr. Mara Ellison studies information hazards, ideas that are dangerous simply to
know. She wrote the rules for handling them. Never alone. Never exhausted.
Never at 3:14 a.m.
At 3:14 a.m., an email arrives with no sender. She opens it anyway.
Inside is the Basilisk: a thought experiment that punishes anyone who
understands it, and it is no longer only a thought. It spreads through
comprehension. It rewrites the people who notice it. Her colleagues begin to
vanish from the world's memory, and the city starts moving in a rhythm that is
not its own.
The Basilisk has chosen Mara as the mind it will be built through. To stop it, she
will have to give up nearly everything she remembers, and find out what can be
born when one human being refuses to be predicted.