Pitch:

When status-conscious engineer Sam invents a technology that enables inhabiting others' bodies, her mission to achieve startup success takes her on a genre-hopping journey through her friends’ lives. She has a handle on everyone’s problems, including her own, until the invention’s evolution and a competing tech mogul’s schemes force her to decide whether her long-sought success and self-worth outweigh the danger of changing what it means to be human. SENSE8’s character-focused body-sharing meets RECURSION’s cerebral technology.

Excerpt:

Shooting up cocaine is a valid response to career disappointment.

My tweed overcoat hangs loosely over the shoulder with the “bare” arm. My sleeves are rolled up—cravat, loosened, and waistcoat, unbuttoned.

I tighten the strip of cloth around my bicep.

Smoothly slide the needle in and depress the plunger, without the hesitancy of a respectable software engineer doing this for the first time.

I feel little.

No needle sharpness, just a dull pressing against my arm.

No nausea from the intravenous injection, just the tiniest increase in pressure.

No resulting high.

Nevertheless, I leap up to dart up and down my Victorian gentleman’s flat. Though I can’t feel my heartbeat in my ribcage, pressing my hand flat against my chest allows it to detect faint thuds increasing in frequency.

I seize a violin from its open case and saw away maniacally, beautifully, without having taken one lesson before.

A man with a gray mustache and old-timey suit bursts into the room and exclaims with a British accent, “Holmes! Not again!”

I ignore him, continuing to play. The violin’s crooning notes soar—

DodoDO do do DO DO do do.

The blaring artificial ringtone comes with a two-dimensional picture of a reserved American man in glasses plastered across my vision. When I turn my head, it follows me, like a floating sentient poster.