Is "The Forty-Floor Syndrome" free to read?

Yes, "The Forty-Floor Syndrome" by ButterPicks is completely free to read on ButterNovel. All 8 chapters are available without any cost.

How many chapters does "The Forty-Floor Syndrome" have?

"The Forty-Floor Syndrome" currently has 8 chapters available on ButterNovel. New chapters may be added as the author continues the story.

Who is the author of "The Forty-Floor Syndrome"?

"The Forty-Floor Syndrome" is written by ButterPicks. You can find more novels by this author on ButterNovel.

The Forty-Floor Syndrome - Read Free Online | Crime Novel by ButterPicks

Name: The Forty-Floor Syndrome
Availability: InStock
Author: ButterPicks

In Halberion—a sealed, self-governed city built upward instead of outward—power is measured in floors. Below Floor Twenty, you’re a worker. Below Thirty, you’re noise. Above Forty, you’re untouchable. Three days before she plunges from the 47th floor of the Vesper Tower, political analyst Iris Thorne sends a message to someone who has every reason to ignore her. That someone is Calem Rhys—a former behavioral-linguistics engineer who helped design Halberion’s cognitive compliance systems before abandoning the project and vanishing from public life. Iris’s message contains a single encrypted file and a warning: “If anything happens to me, open this. And don’t trust the elevators.” Hours later, Iris is declared a suicide. The statement is clean. Too clean. Detective Arielle Soren, assigned to the case she wasn’t supposed to touch, finds the official reports already signed before she even receives them. Evidence disappears from secure servers. Keycard logs reset themselves. And the witnesses who lived on the same floor as Iris refuse to say what they heard—or what they saw being carried out at 2:14 a.m. When Calem decrypts Iris’s final file, fragments emerge: voices flattened into monotone, forced “adjustment sessions,” and a clinical term repeated with unnerving calm— “SYNDROME: Phase Forty.” Victims who tried to leave the program have been falling, vanishing, or “silently recuperating” in private facilities owned by the same conglomerate that built every tower above Floor Forty. Someone is manufacturing loyalty. Someone is editing personalities. And someone is watching Calem and Arielle from a height where the city’s laws don’t reach. Because once you step onto the fortieth floor, Halberion stops being a city. It becomes a system. And systems do not tolerate errors.

Calem Rhys had learned, over the past three years, to ignore the sound of footsteps in his hallway. In Halberion, people moved like clockwork—predictable, hurried, purposeful. They didn’t linger, they didn’t greet neighbors, and they certainly didn’t knock on unfamiliar doors. The city rewarded efficiency and punished curiosity, which suited Calem perfectly. He had chosen anonymity like someone chooses a new coat: practical, necessary, and easy to slip into. So when the footsteps stopped directly outside his apartment, he froze. Not many deliveries reached Floor Eleven. Too low for prestige, too high for people who actually needed day-to-day shipments. Calem wasn’t waiting for anything. He hadn’t ordered groceries, hadn’t bought equipment, hadn’t renewed any subscriptions he might accidentally be traced through. He waited. A soft thunk landed against the floor. Then silence again—one second, two, three— The footsteps retreated. Calem waited a full minute before moving. Carefully, he cracked open the door. A small, matte-black parcel sat perfectly centered on the hallway’s polished concrete. No label. No origin stamp. No automated routing sticker from Halberion’s distribution grid. Just a single white strip of paper taped across the top with one handwritten word: CAL. He stared at it. No one called him that. Not anymore. He bent down, picked up the package, and closed the door behind him with a quiet click. The lock engaged automatically, but his pulse remained unsettled—as if the hallway might open

The Forty-Floor Syndrome

The Forty-Floor Syndrome

Blurb

The Package on Floor Eleven

Table of Contents

The Package on Floor Eleven

The Wrong Kind of Silence

Arielle Soren Doesn’t Believe in Accidents

The File That Wasn’t Meant to Survive

Phase Forty

Above Jurisdiction

The City Rewrites Itself

The Fortieth Floor

The Package on Floor Eleven