Which memories are left behind in the creation of national history? Which lives are left behind in the process of modernization? Set in a city inspired by Shenzhen, China, Prototype One follows Feng Yuxia, an intern at the city’s most prestigious venture capital firm, as she invests in a Western technology that clears ghosts off haunted properties for land development. But when the technology fails, she must team up with denizens of the city’s criminal underbelly to stop the ghosts she unwittingly unleashed, and to salvage her own reputation. Which memories are inscribed within these ghosts, and can she bear to erase them? 

Prototype One draws from the works of Nalo Hopkinson, Aihwa Ong, and Esme Weijun Wang to explore the role of technology in mediating history and memory, the inscription of traumas upon a body, and the collision of the personal, the political, and the profitable.