# Dead End

**Author:** Wallace Macfarlane
**Tags:** 
**Price:** Free
**Formats:** DOCX, EPUB, FB2, PDF, TXT
**Downloads:** 20
**Added:** 10.07.2026
**URL:** https://samolit.com/books/95947

## Description

In a distant 26th-century future, humanity has engineered a chilling solution to loss and grief: pseudo-life, artificial replicas grown from recorded memories that seamlessly replace the dead, the disgraced, and the inconvenient. Scientist William Manning Norcross has spent his career perfecting this technology, believing it has spared society from the pain of death, madness, and punishment. But his former student, John Davis Drumstetter, returns from a mission to build a stellar overdrive for interstellar travel profoundly shaken, having glimpsed what may be lost when authentic human experience is quietly erased and replaced with convenient copies. As Drumstetter's doubts grow into open defiance, Norcross must confront the uncomfortable truth behind his life's work and the sterile, taboo-laden society it has created, one where sexual mores are relaxed yet eating in public remains scandalous. Wallace Macfarlane's tightly constructed novella asks piercing questions about identity, memory, and what is sacrificed when a civilization engineers away its capacity to suffer. First published in the golden age of Galaxy Science Fiction, this sharp, unsettling story remains a compelling meditation on mortality, morality, and the true cost of a world without genuine consequence.