The Other Me

HE NEVER SAID IT. FORTY MILLION PEOPLE WATCHED HIM SAY IT.

At 4:02 a.m., a video appears online. In it, Martin Ashby, a seventy-four-year-old retired American Foreign Commercial Officer, sits in front of a plain gray wall, folds his hands, and calmly confesses to thirty years of selling his country's secrets.

By sunrise, forty million people have watched it.
By noon, his bank accounts are frozen, his old friends have stopped calling, and the FBI is sitting at his kitchen table in the Catskill Mountains.

There is only one problem. Martin never said a word of it.

The face is his. The voice is his. Even the nervous way he taps his glasses is his, except that the man on the screen uses the wrong hand. Only one person notices: Helen, his wife of fifty years. Nobody believes her.

Martin spent thirty years helping American companies do business in some of the world's most dangerous places. He knows how a lie is built: you start with something true, change one small detail, and let the truth carry the lie for you. Whoever built the other Martin knows it too. And they have been studying him for a very long time.

In a world where anyone can be copied perfectly, how do you prove you are the real one?

Then the man Martin worked beside for a decade is found dead. New videos appear, each more damning than the last. "The other Martin" threatens United States senators by name. A federal warrant is issued. And the people who could clear him are being silenced one by one.

With nothing left but his memory, a lifetime habit of keeping paper copies, and a handful of people willing to trust him, Martin goes on the run. His allies are unlikely ones: a brilliant forensic analyst who once exposed a fake that destroyed a good man's life, a young engineer haunted by what he helped create, and a senator who remembers a debt from long ago.

The trail leads from a quiet house at the end of a gravel road to the glass towers of a powerful Washington defense contractor, to a buried 1991 embassy report from the burning oil fields of postwar Kuwait, and finally to a Senate confirmation hearing broadcast live to the nation. There, with the cameras rolling and the whole country watching, Martin must face the man who stole his face, while the machine that copied him waits for one last chance to speak.

He has eight days to prove the hardest thing of all: that the real man is the one standing in front of you.

THE OTHER ME is a fast-paced, all-too-plausible thriller for our time. It is a story about truth and lies, about power and the people who hide behind it, and about the one thing no machine can fake: being truly known by the people who love you.

Readers will find:

• A gripping, ripped-from-tomorrow's-headlines premise about deepfakes, artificial intelligence, and viral disinformation
• A hero unlike any other in the genre: a seventy-four-year-old man armed with decency, a sharp memory, and a cracked leather address book
• A moving portrait of a fifty-year marriage tested under the glare of the world's cameras
• Authentic embassy, Washington, and Gulf War detail drawn from the author's own career overseas
• A heart-pounding climax inside the halls of the United States Senate

Perfect for readers who enjoy political thrillers, technothrillers, espionage fiction, and stories of ordinary people who refuse to be silenced.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael K. Bender served overseas as a U.S. Foreign Commercial Officer in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, and as an international business executive in the United Kingdom and China, with work-related travel to more than 40 countries. He now writes full-time in New York's Catskill Mountains.

You will never look at a video the same way again.