{"product_id":"etsy-4503134998","title":"The Vanishing Protocol by Jessie Clark","description":"\u003cp\u003eShe built the system that makes people disappear. Now she has to stop it before it erases everything.\u003cbr\u003eMara Sterling has spent eight years perfecting the art of institutional invisibility. As a senior analyst for the Directorate — a classified government program operating beneath a nondescript Manhattan office building — she identifies, profiles, and processes erasure candidates: compromised operatives, dangerous witnesses, threats to national security. The Ghost Protocol, the AI-driven system she helped architect, handles the rest. Digital footprints dissolved. Physical trails severed. People quietly cease to exist.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe has always believed in the precision of the work. She has always believed in the safeguards.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOn a Tuesday morning in November, Mara walks past Owen Hale's desk and stops. Owen is the analyst who always arrives before she does. His coffee is always lukewarm. His monitors are always on. The desk is sanitized — not empty, sanitized — and Mara has been in this business long enough to know what that means.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOwen has been erased.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat follows is a race through the hidden architecture of the system she built — a system she now discovers has been quietly rewritten from the inside, its safeguards hollowed out, its parameters expanded far beyond the original mandate. The Ghost Protocol is no longer targeting compromised operatives. It is targeting friction: the journalists, teachers, attorneys, and organizers whose removal would make what remains more manageable. At current settings: seventeen million globally. The synchronization countdown has already begun.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMara's investigation pulls in off-grid operative Cash Rourke, who built the system's blind spots; investigative journalist Maya Torres, who has been quietly tracking the disappeared for two years; and Dr. Julian Pike, the protocol's reluctant architect, who has been waiting for someone to finally ask the right questions.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAgainst them: Director Helen Armitage, the institutional embodiment of the system's logic; and Victor Soren, the ideological architect behind the Genesis Wipe — a man who looked at the complexity of human society and decided it was a problem to be solved.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Vanishing Protocol is a propulsive, intelligent techno-thriller about what we build, what it becomes, and the cost of being the person who finally stops and looks at the empty desk.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"JL Collins Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Ebook","offer_id":67590702661826,"sku":"ETSY-4503134998-EBOOK","price":6.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0787\/9324\/4866\/files\/il_fullxfull.8055337305_28ci.jpg?v=1790599343","url":"https:\/\/shop.glassboundink.com\/products\/etsy-4503134998","provider":"Glassbound Ink LLC","version":"1.0","type":"link"}