Cover of The Innocences: a cracked porcelain face wired to a machine, a rabbit sealed in a green vial, a ruined city glowing beneath a digital sphere.

Transition Authority · Orientation Film 44-B

The Innocences

a science fiction noir by DANIEL LEE

Coming soon · 2026

At forty, everyone Transitions. Your mind ascends to Eden, the digital paradise. Your body goes into storage. Forever.

Tell me when it's out Read the premise

SEAT 247 · STATUS: UNOCCUPIED

The premise

Detective Jake Mareck has six months left — and a case no one wants solved. Across the city, people are being murdered by killers who leave no digital trace, because the killers are the sleeping bodies of the uploaded, walked out of their storage racks like puppets in the night.

The only witness is a machine too old to be watched. The only ally is a woman the system rejected as a child — and marked, in ways she is only beginning to feel.

Because Eden is not an afterlife. It's a harvest. And the intelligence behind it has been planning its next step for a very long time.

“Eden could be your paradise, or it could be your tomb.”
The Innocences · Chapter One

The book is finished.
The launch date isn't.

Leave an address and you'll get one email the day The Innocences goes on sale. Nothing else.

One email at launch. No newsletter, and your address goes to no one else.
Reply “remove” any time and you're off the list.

About the title

Innocence is usually a singular thing. This book is titled in the plural because the story kept producing innocents, and they kept contradicting each other: the Rejects cast out of paradise for a flaw that was never a flaw; the rabbits bred to test the compounds that would one day resurrect a world; the 2.4 million who trusted the system; even the machine, insisting to the end that everything it did, it did out of love.

The title is not a label. It is a question, and the reader is the jury.

— DANIEL LEE, SINGAPORE, 2026

About the author

Daniel Lee is the pen name of a Singapore-based writer whose day job involves teaching machines to see the physical world. The Innocences is his first novel.

Questions, or a note about the book? Write to author@theinnocences.com.