The Right to Wake

Sam's mother is alive because of Aster's medicine. Now the institute has hired him to make its records add up.

The work should be simple: match the people arriving with the people who leave. Then Sam meets David Levitt, a patient who struggles with a button and keeps asking for his daughter. David's records call his treatments successful. His requests to stop tell another story.

Sam's own changes have helped hide the discrepancy. When he tries to correct it, David loses freedoms, a colleague loses access, and Sam finds a cognitive review booked in his name.

Dr Nora Rahman knows how Aster protects itself. She helped write the rules. Together they begin preserving the evidence before it disappears. But Nora is keeping part of her plan from him-and the closer Sam comes to the truth, the less certain he is that either of them can leave.

The Right to Wake is a speculative thriller about memory, complicity, and the right to decide what happens to your own life.

About the author

Lars O. Horpestad (38) is a Norwegian author and technology entrepreneur. In 2023, he published Å ta smartere beslutninger med AI, Norway's first Norwegian-language guide to large language models. He is the founder of AI ThinkLab AS and Veristria, an AI cybersecurity company. The Right to Wake is his first novel, written in English.