Plague of Pythons

In a world where governments have collapsed into military chaos and then silence, a strange plague has begun seizing human minds, turning ordinary people into unwilling perpetrators of unspeakable violence. Chandler is one of the branded: marked with an 'H' for Hoaxer, driven from his community after the plague forced him to commit atrocity. But he isn't faking. He is genuinely guilty and genuinely possessed, and the question that haunts him is one the survivors dare not ask: if you commit murder while trapped outside your own body, are you still a murderer? Pohl constructs a nightmarish interrogation of free will and moral responsibility, asking what justice means in a world where the will can be hijacked. Chandler's journey toward the source of the plague becomes both a desperate quest for a cure and an existential reckoning. The answer he finds is far stranger and more troubling than anyone expected, a twist that reframes everything the survivors believe about guilt, punishment, and the nature of evil. This is science fiction as moral philosophy, brutal and unflinching.