Breakthrough

Breakthrough is a short story by Daphne du Maurier, first published in 1966 and later collected in Don't Look Now (1971). Stephen, an electronics engineer, is posted to a remote research facility on the English coast where the scientist MacLean is developing a series of machines named Charon, after the ferryman of the dead in Greek mythology.

MacLean believes that what we call the soul is a form of energy that can be captured at the moment of death rather than lost, and Charon Three is built to store it. As Stephen is drawn into the team's work, one member volunteers to test the machine's limits, and the story follows the ethical and personal cost of the experiment.

This edition is published as a standalone volume in Penguin's Modern Classics series, pairing du Maurier's clinical prose with a premise that anticipates later fiction about consciousness, technology, and the digitization of death.