Approximate Truth: Under Interrogation

The machine does not reveal truth. It produces confidence.

Detective Caleb Smith believes in the data. In a city governed by the Compassion Protocol, neural synchronization has replaced the uncertainty of interrogation. Strap on the band, sync with a suspect, and feel their guilt. No more bias. No more doubt. Just the raw, high-resolution evidence of the human heart.

But some signals are lies.

When a young woman is murdered in the foothills, the machine red-lines for a terrified father whose panic is indistinguishable from a confession. But for the witness who found the body, the readout is a perfect, chilling flatline. Absolute calm. Absolute innocence.

Caleb clears a predator. He destroys a victim.

Now the bodies are dropping again, and the machine has no answers. Hidden in the protocol's blind spot is a "Null Signal": a killer the technology was never built to see, a man so hollow that the system mistakes his void for virtue. To stop the slaughter, Caleb must go rogue, sacrifice his badge, and risk his own emotional baseline to hunt a monster invisible to every instrument except the one the machine was designed to replace: human instinct.

Under Interrogation is the second novel in the Approximate Truth series--a 10-book near-future hard science fiction series exploring what happens when unreliable brain-sync technology becomes socially mandatory. Each novel stands alone, focusing on one institutional domain while cumulatively tracing how society normalizes cognitive intrusion.

The technology never improves. What changes is what people are willing to accept.