Shadowbanned

Synopsis

His only follower is a dead god. In Solace, God lives in your eyes. The Hive sees every post and counts every follower, and it pays for attention in credits, homes and miracles. Its biggest apps have grown into gods of their own: megacorporations with towers above the clouds and believers by the million. Fame is worship. If nobody follows you, even the streetlights won't wake when you walk beneath them. Wick Cresset barely has any followers. His parents were the most-watched people alive, until a quest swallowed them on a live stream. Now their names are a shrine that still earns, for someone else. The grandfather who raised him died forgotten. The city wants his home, and the feed has already moved on. Then, in a box under a dead man's bed, Wick finds an old phone with an app that won't delete. Kith remembers. It remembers quests the Hive stopped showing thirty-one years ago, with the prizes still inside. It remembers sealed doors, rules nobody alive knows how to break, and the night the lamps of the Dim went dark. It is ancient and cranky, and it's dying on a cracked screen. It is also a god, and its whole congregation is one unlit boy. To save his home, Wick has to enter the game he swore he'd never play. To find out what happened to his parents, he'll have to climb it, past the champions and the megacorp gods, all the way to whatever watches from the top. The Hive never deletes anything. It just stops showing it to you.