EPOCH ZERO

Wei Chen is twenty-six years old and unemployed when he dies in a highway accident. He doesn't wake up in a hospital. He wakes up face-down in the dirt of a broken world, surrounded by ruins that stretch as far as he can see, with nothing in his pockets but a convenience store receipt and everything he's ever read still inside his head. The world he finds himself in is Earth, or what Earth became. A parallel version, 150 years after a cascading collapse called the Unraveling swept away civilization through plague, nuclear exchange, and a decades-long volcanic winter. The survivors have regressed to scattered tribal groups living in the bones of cities they no longer understand, with short lifespans, no written language, and no memory of how things used to work beyond the mythology they call the Bright Age.