The Portal

Three years after tragedy shattered his family, tech visionary Jacob Hastings re-emerges with a creation meant to change the world. The Portal-an immersive neural system that allows users to step inside their own memories-promises connection, healing, and the chance to relive the moments that made them who they are.

To investors, it's the next great leap in human experience.

To Jacob, it's something else entirely: a way to see the son he lost, if only inside the code.

But the past isn't meant to be perfect. When a live demonstration turns catastrophic-when a child's face flickers to life inside the system-Jacob realizes that his invention isn't remembering the past; it's rewriting it. As reality begins to blur, his estranged wife Beth and their children are left to navigate the fallout of a man who keeps building worlds instead of facing his own.

Across one cold December in Cincinnati, The Portal becomes more than a technological experiment-it becomes a mirror for guilt, love, and the need to believe that what's broken can still be made whole.

Tense, intimate, and cinematic, The Portal is a near-future morality thriller about memory, consequence, and the dangerous comfort of second chances. In the tradition of Blake Crouch's Dark Matter and Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility, Jeremy Marsh blends science, emotion, and suspense into a story that asks one haunting question:

If you could step back into your best moments, would you ever come home?