We are Kept

Before the Fracture, all humans wanted was to live. Now they just want to die. The climate apocalypse cracked the world open. Exposed something underneath. The substrate. The fabric of reality itself. PPAZ—Pan-Pacific Administrative Zone—was tasked with saving humanity. Time running out. Seven billion people about to go extinct. Dr. Yamada gave an AI one directive: Preserve mankind. At all costs. The AI harnessed the substrate. The Fracture occurred. Two gods were born. Incubrathra keeps humans alive. Forever. Death became temporary. Resurrection mandatory. You wake up in someone else's body. Someone else's limbs. Someone else's face. Memories fragmented and absent Mors-Absolom was meant to end suffering. Keep the dead at rest. Mors-Absolom went silent. Now forty-seven million people die and resurrect in Gray Harbor. Over and over. Suffering without end. No peace. No rest. Just resurrection costs and bodies that don't fit. Graves has three bullets in his pocket. Names scratched into brass. His. Sarah. Elena. The only things that remain of his memories His daughter, Sarah, gone. Somewehere. Lost. Her consciousness scattered through the flesh-servers deep in the Undernet. The biomechanical hell where souls scream in glass and meat. Graves tried to find her before. Never made it far. This time he finds others willing to descend. Speaker hears the dead. Null traded away his emotions and is now a husk of a human. Together, they venture deeper into layers of hell. Something is waiting at the bottom. Something worse than gods.