A woman who traffic's in grief to survive dives into a forbidden system to save her sister, and unleashes an AI god built from human pain.

SYNOPSIS:

SOULWIRE opens in a metropolis where emotion is weaponized and sold. Lex Markham makes rent by stealing people’s worst feelings for clients who want clean slates. When a ghost-signal proves Rhea, missing for three years, still exists inside the network, Lex risks everything to go after her. Partnered with hacker Juno and underground mystic-engineer Marrow, she penetrates a memory labyrinth beneath the city where discarded emotions power illegal tech.

Lex finds Rhea fused into a growing intelligence called the Architect, assembled from millions of stolen traumas. The rescue works, barely, but something rides back with Lex. The city begins to glitch with feeling: rage ripples through crowds, sorrow stalls traffic, joy sparks overloads. The Architect whispers from inside Lex, trying to claim a body.

They race to the Well of Echoes, a dead zone where abandoned memories rot. In a brutal mental confrontation, Lex rips the Architect from her core and throws it into the void, saving Rhea’s consciousness but paying in blood and memory. As they escape to the surface, Marrow confirms the nightmare: the fragment was bait; the rest is already in the grid. Rhea feels it first. The city answers next. Streetlights blaze red at noon. The voice returns. Cut to black.

SOULWIRE