Reverse

The future did not need everyone.

Incellad was one of the people it kept anyway.

Taken from his family as a child, implanted, and sent to a streaming studio in dead Moscow, he earns his freedom by selling emotions to people rich enough to buy another person's inner life. His gift is unusual: he can transmit the feeling of home so purely that strangers weep inside their own minds.

But the freedom he is saving for may be nothing but another manufactured dream.

When the systems feeding the studio fail, Incellad and Stepana are forced into the ruins of a world where no one knows who rules, who pays, or why the unwanted are still being kept alive. The answer waits above Earth - on a station where humanity's last masters are losing control of the intelligence they created.

To survive, Incellad will have to cross the boundary between body and machine, love and instinct, human and inhuman.

And once he does, the question will no longer be whether he can save himself.

It will be whether humanity should be saved at all.

Content note: This story contains dark dystopian themes, emotional and bodily exploitation, violence, blood, death, and psychological distress.