Revealed through corrupted memory files, corporate audit logs, and recursive system reports, Delete Me Kindly is a found-fiction/sci-fi novella about a grieving data technician unraveling inside the machine he helped build. As fragments of his missing wife’s consciousness bleed into the harvested human memories he is tasked to compile and implant, his own neural chip corrupts and malfunctions. Reality fractures and hallucinations accumulate. Memories loop and mutate. A lost cat and a shadowy teenage girl lead him toward an underground lab of black-market android shells, where he must choose whether to restore himself or disappear. Part corporate dystopia, part psychological noir, Delete Me Kindly excavates what happens when grief, memory, and technology collide in a system designed to churn human lives into raw data.
«A soft machinery of grief. In this assured debut, Katherine Martin writes from inside a compromised archive of damaged memory, procedural afterlives, and frayed desire, where the self persists only as a corrupted echo circulating through indifferent systems. In Delete Me Kindly, the question is not whether the mind survives, but who owns the fragments once it does.»——Zoetica Ebb & Kenji Siratori
«In this restrained and estranged dystopia, lyric interiority is continually interrupted by the operations of cognitive extraction. One person begins to notice gaps, absences that feel engineered. As buried histories surface, memory and identity reveal themselves as manipulated constructs, pointing to hidden architectures of control.»——Miranda Mellis
«A maddened and yet tender digital hallucination, which feels all too real. Martin takes on the question of what life is like in the digital age and comes up with the answer: a lot like dying.»——Brian Evenson
Katherine Martin works in data architecture and experimental prose. She uses her background in chemistry for the construction of complex data systems and the maintenance of a single, oversized houseplant. Her work has appeared in Always Crashing.
