One Year Behind: a Novel
- Publisher
- Unolect Publishing
- Categories
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Author Name
- Aiden Graant
- Illustrated by
- Original Language
-
United States
- Rights sold in
- FUll
- Kindle Edition
- 260 pages
- Dimensions
- 6x9
- ISBN / ISSN / Unique Identifier
- B0HDSB5BGD
Synopsis
Overview The Ledger of Next Year is a psychological sci-fi novel and emotional drama following Aiden Ferreira , a forty-three-year-old widowed field claims adjuster for Meridian Mutual Assurance in the coastal town of Calder. Grieving the loss of his wife Sofia (who died in August 2021) and navigating a distant relationship with his teenage daughter Mira, Aiden’s mundane life is upended when his smartphone begins receiving impossible, highly detailed system notifications timestamped exactly one year into the future . Key Characters Aiden Ferreira : A pragmatic, detail-oriented insurance adjuster who approaches life and tragedy through verification and evidence. Mira Ferreira : A...
Overview The Ledger of Next Year is a psychological sci-fi novel and emotional drama following Aiden Ferreira , a forty-three-year-old widowed field claims adjuster for Meridian Mutual Assurance in the coastal town of Calder. Grieving the loss of his wife Sofia (who died in August 2021) and navigating a distant relationship with his teenage daughter Mira, Aiden’s mundane life is upended when his smartphone begins receiving impossible, highly detailed system notifications timestamped exactly one year into the future . Key Characters Aiden Ferreira : A pragmatic, detail-oriented insurance adjuster who approaches life and tragedy through verification and evidence. Mira Ferreira : Aiden’s sixteen-year-old daughter, a talented cellist who stopped playing after her mother’s death. Priya Raman : A brilliant, overqualified computer scientist running a local device forensics shop on Kestrel Street. Thea Osman : An elite financial manager in Vale City who executes high-stakes trades for Aiden. Ines Barros : A corporate quantitative analyst who reverse-engineers Aiden’s trading anomalies. Corren : A calm, procedure-bound representative for the mysterious underwriting firm Perenna Continuity . Detailed Plot Summary 1. The Anomaly and the Five Rules On Saturday, January 20, 2024, at 11:52 p.m. , Aiden’s phone screen lights up with a mysterious system push reporting that the 47th President has taken the oath of office indoors due to extreme cold. While inspecting the metadata, Aiden discovers a notation in the digitization field: [ + 1 ] —indicating the message was generated 366 days in the future . Aiden purchases a cheap grey notebook ($4.99) to record every incoming notification. To maintain discipline, he establishes five strict rules : Record the text exactly (no paraphrase). Record the same night. No interpretation. Do not act on an entry (underlined twice). Tell no one until there are ten verified ticks. The nightly alerts range from mundane local developments—such as a bakery closing or weather events—to major global occurrences, including a Chinese AI model causing a single-day $589 billion market drop for a semiconductor giant, and intimate personal claims like Mira attending the Ardem Conservatory of Music or Aiden dreaming less about his late wife. 2. Forensic Investigation & Financial Exploitation Aiden takes his device to Priya Raman at RAMAN DEVICE FORENSICS. Priya’s hardware extraction reveals that the notifications bypass the phone’s entire operating system and network stack ( wake_lock acquired — screen_on — 240ms with zero network data or ranking logs). Even inside a sealed Faraday cage, across factory wipes, or after transferring the SIM to a brand-new, prepaid handset on a different operating system, the 11:52 p.m. alerts continue arriving without fail. As the messages prove unerringly accurate—starting with the 2025 presidential inauguration and the $589 billion market crash—Aiden breaks Rule Four. He uses his $4,110 retirement savings to buy short-dated put options, expanding the investment to $194,612 in days. Partnering with financial advisor Thea Osman , Aiden creates an LLC to execute multi-million-dollar trades on market events predicted in the ledger, eventually building an eight-figure fortune. Aiden also tests whether future events can be altered by warning authorities about the scheduled collapse of the Ellis Park footbridge. Although inspectors issue a report, the bridge collapses on the exact day predicted. Aiden realizes that while the event still occurred, his intervention created a double verification: the event happened and he tried to stop it. 3. Personal Fractures and Institutional Surveillance Aiden’s obsession creates severe strains: Family : Mira discovers the ledger hidden in the kitchen. She confronts Aiden, pointing out that intimate entries like "You dream about her less this year" are not public predictions, but deeply personal facts about him. The Analyst : Quantitative analyst Ines Barros discovers that Aiden’s trades cluster around arbitrary dates that resolve into ordinary news events when shifted by exactly twelve months. Realizing Ines has uncovered his edge, Aiden uses non-disclosure agreements and administrative levers through Thea Osman to have Ines quietly dismissed and her work erased—an act that haunts him. The Organization : Aiden traces financial paper trails to a secretive corporate entity in Vale City called Perenna Continuity , which describes itself as a "specialist underwriter". In August 2026, the notifications abruptly stop after a final push notification bearing an app icon and a system alert stating that a health insurance/continuity claim has been approved. 4. The Climax and the Devastating Truth Priya discovers that the time delta between Aiden's phone and the sender’s server is off by exactly one year. Aiden demands a formal interview with Perenna Continuity and meets Corren . During the confrontation, Corren delivers the central reveal of the story: Aiden is not receiving predictions from the future; he is living inside a digital simulation ("established instance") . The real Aiden Ferreira was diagnosed with a terminal illness on January 20, 2025 (the "Date of Loss") and passed away on August 12, 2027 . Back in December 2021, shortly after his wife Sofia’s death, the real Aiden had purchased a continuity policy with Perenna Continuity, lodging a full digital snapshot/archive of himself that refreshed annually. His final archive refresh was conducted on January 20, 2024 . The nightly 11:52 p.m. messages were not future time travel , but real-time messages transmitted by the real, dying Aiden in the actual world (and typed by nineteen-year-old Mira when her father’s hands failed). The timestamp 11:52 p.m. was the exact minute Sofia had died in 2021. Self-Funding Mechanism : The millions Aiden made trading were not an anomaly; the simulation was designed to be "self-funding," using the market positions executed by the digital instance to automatically pay Perenna Continuity’s ongoing maintenance fees. 5. Resolution Overwhelmed by the realization that he spent three years treating his dying self's personal messages as stock tips, Aiden breaks down. He unhides the two hundred "personal" entries he had buried in a secondary spreadsheet tab—messages like "I ate the soup," "You should sleep more," and "she's ok. i want you to know that. she's actually ok" . Aiden reconciles with Mira, sharing the truth with her and showing her the message where her real-world counterpart confirmed she was okay. He liquidates his financial holdings, setting aside only what is necessary to maintain his current existence, and gives away the rest. He begins working at a local hardware store, keeping a simple, honest journal of his daily life. On January 20, 2028 , as the instance's timeline catches up to the real world and the one-year lag dissolves, Aiden sits in his kitchen with Mira. His phone lights up with a new message: "hi dad. can you hear me yet" At the bottom of the screen, three dots appear as someone begins typing back. Core Themes Grief and Avoidance : Aiden’s desire to reduce reality to verifiable claims and checklists stems from his inability to process his wife's death. Information vs. Intimacy : The contrast between market data (actionable, cold) and human connection (unfalsifiable, quiet). Determinism and Agency : The tragedy of trying to control or profit from a narrative rather than being present within it.
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