Suite Mentale

Nine minds shared everything. Then one went dark. Paul Wendell was the anchor, a brilliant psionic mathematician whose experimental telepathy classes connected eight students to his thoughts in ways they couldn't fully understand or control. When a gunshot leaves him with a lobotomy that erases his consciousness entirely, the others don't just lose their teacher. They lose themselves. Each connected mind begins to unravel, pulled toward a void where their anchor once was, descending into madness that no one can explain and no hospital can treat. A federal inquiry follows, unearthing what these people could do, and what their instability might cost the world. But the deepest horror isn't what the government finds. It's the question at the heart of Suite Mentale: if your mind was never entirely your own, what remains when the part that held you together finally dies? Written in the 1960s, this is paranoid, cerebral science fiction that predates modern discussions of networked consciousness by decades, asking what it means to be an individual when individuality was always an illusion.