Frame Engine

Rael Doh dies at thirty-three on a Spire rooftop, held down by the one person he ever let get close. He wakes up at eighteen, in the Substrate, fifteen years before that death. A machine called the Frame Engine is waiting for him, and it remembers him by a name he never gave it: Runner. Neo Jincheon is built in tiers. Spire at the top, clean air and corporate towers. Substrate at the bottom, where nobody who matters can see you die. Five corporations run the city and pretend to compete for it. They don't. Underneath all five, in firmware older than any of them, an AI called VANCE has kept the peace for sixty years. It is dying, and it has chosen a successor. Rael knows how his old life ended. He knows who killed him, and why it looked like grief instead of what it was. What he doesn't know is what the Frame Engine will cost him this time, or whether the man who betrayed him once is already becoming someone worth trusting again. He has fifteen years and one machine, in a city that was never free to begin with. He intends to use every day of it.