Do Spiders Leave Footprints?

Adrian Keene remembers being bitten by a spider when he was four years old. He remembers the yellow chair it was hiding beneath. The photograph says the chair was red.

Years later, the world has become much better at remembering.

Automated systems coordinate journeys, hospitals, relationships, public information and everyday decisions. They are useful, responsive and usually right. Life becomes safer. Services improve. People learn to trust what works.

But records and memories do not always agree. Messages arrive out of order. Authentic images tell different stories. Human judgement catches things the systems miss — sometimes too late to matter. And as more decisions become connected, it becomes increasingly difficult to say where responsibility, authority and even memory reside.

Nothing is obviously broken.

That may be the problem.

Do Spiders Leave Footprints? is a literary speculative novel about memory, trust and the fragile systems we come to depend on — and what happens when the evidence is convincing but certainty remains impossible.