Chapter 1 Solace

If there is a God in this world, it is the Hive.

Everyone believes it because they see its power at work every day. It is the social network every human is born into, living in your eyes from your first breath. You can see your name, your followers, your rank, and a feed that never stops.

When you publish a post, the Hive's algorithm records who sees it and how they interact. If you go viral and gather followers, the Hive pays you in credits, gifts, promotion, and access.

Sometimes it pays in miracles.

Wick was watching one now.

On the right side of his vision, a live feed from the Glow district showed a little girl sitting up in her hospital bed before nine million viewers. She had been in a coma for two years. Her mother's post had gone viral that morning. The Hive had predicted the exact minute her daughter would wake up, and it was right.

A divine miracle.

The girl blinked at the camera and smiled. Her mother pressed both hands over her mouth, weeping, while millions of hearts floated up the edge of the feed like bubbles in a glass. The view count spun so fast the numbers blurred.

Wick was glad for the child's recovery. But miracles, or even mild luck, never came his way.

He stood under a light drizzle at his grandfather's funeral, alone.

The Dim district's graveyard was a cluster of muddy plots squeezed between two housing blocks. Nothing about it was built for grief. Rain collected in the gutters and ran downhill in thin gray streams. A ventilation fan rattled in the building next door, and the air smelled of wet cement and frying oil drifting up from the noodle stalls in the distance.

The Dim sat at the bottom of Solace Hill, with the rest of the city stacked on top. The underside of the Mid district hung overhead like a low, dripping ceiling. Through a single gap between the towers, Wick could see farther up, into the Glow district at the very top. It was bright, white, and humming with the attention of millions.

None of that light reached where Wick lived. Down here, it was always early evening.

The funeral arrangement cost 300 credits, the cheapest package in the Dim. For that, he got one hour on the muddy plot, a coffin made of recycled board, and two rented robots older than he was. The first robot limped. The second had a cracked face panel that kept flickering between a smile and an error code.

They lifted the coffin. The limping one misstepped, and the box tipped, slid, and hit the mud with a wet slap.

"Oops," said the smiling one. "We apologize for the inconvenience. Your satisfaction is our priority."

Wick closed his eyes and counted to five. He kept them shut, afraid to see whether the lid had opened up. When he looked, it was still intact, though one corner had split.

The robots lifted the coffin a second time. On the way to the grave, the limping one walked straight into a neighboring headstone, backed up, and tried another angle. The coffin swung between them like a hammock.

If his grandfather had been alive to see this, he would have laughed until he coughed. He would have said that's what you get for three hundred credits, boy, and then complained about robots being the Hive's minions for the rest of the night. Wick almost laughed too from the memory, but it caught in his throat like a sob, so he stopped.

While the robots worked out how to lower the coffin into the hole, Wick looked at the empty plots around him and finally admitted what he had known all week. Nobody else was coming.

His grandfather had twenty-three followers, and most of them were dead. In the Hive, fewer than a hundred followers made you unlit, and a gray status light sat beside your name. Your posts barely reached anyone, and people forgot you existed because nothing reminded them of you. Grandpa Teo had lived like that for thirty-one years, and the only person who had come to see him buried was another unlit person like him standing in the drizzle.

It had been different for Wick's parents. They had been two of the most famous people in Solace with millions of followers, living up in the Glow district. When Wick was born, they streamed it, letting their fans choose what to name him. Over forty million people voted. The winner was Encore, and the Hive placed it on his profile, where it had sat in the corner of his vision every day of his life.

When he was eight, his parents entered a dangerous Hive quest that the whole city watched until the stream cut to black. They never came out.

His parents' memorial had millions of mourners and no bodies. His grandfather had one mourner and a body the robots kept dropping.

After his parents vanished, their properties went back to the Hive. Wick had to come down to live with his grandfather in the Dim district. Grandpa Teo claimed not to own a single screen, and he considered the Hive the worst thing that had ever happened to humanity.

Teo never once called him Encore. From their first night as a family, he called him Wick, and he never explained why. Standing at this empty grave, Wick hated the Hive more than he ever had.

The smiling robot stepped to the head of the plot. "Eulogy mode activated. We are gathered to celebrate the life of Teo Cresset."

At least it got the name right.

"Teo was the loving husband of Marigold for fifty years."

His grandmother's name had been Hana, and she had left when Wick's father was two.

"He enjoyed dance challenges and was a proud, loyal fan of the great apps."

Grandpa Teo had once thrown a shoe at a megacorp's billboard and gotten penalized heavily for it.

"He will be remembered for his love of pets, his long career as a licensed accountant, and his famous lemon cake."

Teo had never owned a pet, held a formal job as far as Wick knew, or baked a single thing in his life.

Teo hadn't posted anything in thirty-one years, so the robot had built a composite stranger out of old public records and guesses, and now it was burying him under it. Fixing the eulogy cost an extra 40 credits. Wick had 218 to his name, so he let the robot talk.

"Teo Cresset is survived by Encore Cresset. Thank you for choosing our service."

The robots backed away to await their next instruction. Rain ticked against the coffin lid at the bottom of the hole. Wick looked down into the grave, and all the humor in him dried up.

He thought about the blackouts when he was small, when the whole block went dark because nobody important was watching its feed. Wick would burst out crying. His grandfather would pull out a stub of candle, strike a match, set it on the kitchen table between them, and say, There. Somebody has to keep one lit. Then he would deal out a deck of paper cards and tell him funny stories until Wick laughed.

He thought about Grandpa Teo's hands. Always spotted and steady, they had begun to tremble over his last month. Wick had pretended not to notice because his grandfather had pretended first.

He understood then that the name Wick was being buried with Teo. Now everyone in Solace would call him Encore. It was the name strangers had picked for a baby they would never meet.

He started to cry, and he didn't try to stop. There was nobody here to see.

"Goodnight, Grandpa—" he said.

His vision pinged before he could finish.

[Halo has tagged you in a video.]

A tagged video played whether you wanted it to or not, filling his sight and blotting out the grave and the rain. It was Halo, his girlfriend of four months. Her face was perfectly visible under professional lighting, and her eyes were wet. Behind her sat the white sofa in her Mid district apartment, the one he had never been allowed to sit on because it was a recurring backdrop in her streams.

"Hi, everyone," she said. "This is hard for me to share."

Above the graveyard gate, a streetlamp that never lit for anyone buried here blinked awake. Close to two hundred thousand people were watching a stream about him.

Halo was a kindness influencer. Her 212,000 followers watched her perform good deeds, and lately, he had been her main project. She was doing unlit-dating, a trend where you dated someone with fewer than 100 followers and streamed the journey to show how charitable you were. You helped them increase their numbers and improved their lives.

Halo's audience loved it, and she had gained thirty thousand followers since their first date. Wick had known what it was from the start, but he went along with it anyway because it made Grandpa Teo happy to know his grandson had someone besides him.

"I really believed I could help Encore rise," Halo said. "When we met, he had twenty-nine followers. I got him all the way to ninety-eight." She smiled at the number. "But last week, he truly disappointed me. I found him in the Dim district, carrying groceries up four flights of stairs for an old unlit woman. For free. It could have been the most beautiful post of the year, and you guys would've loved it. But he wouldn't let me film it."

She stopped, blinking back a tear. "Encore doesn't want to be followed. He hates virality and wants to stay unknown and unseen. And I finally understand why nothing I did worked. Four months in front of two hundred thousand people, and all he gained was sixty-nine followers. That isn't bad luck. I'm afraid Encore is shadowbanned. I can't keep holding the hand of someone who is cursed like that."

Wick studied his girlfriend's face.

He caught what her followers missed. As she said shadowbanned, Halo's eyes flicked for half a second to the corner of her vision, where her view count sat. The tears were real, but she was crying them for her audience.

Wick had refused to let her film because the old woman would have been in the frame, standing at her own door in a worn housecoat while Halo's followers decided how sorry to feel for her. He would refuse again and again.

If you're only good when someone's watching, you're not good. You're just well-lit, Teo used to say.

Halo was dumping Wick publicly on the day of his grandfather's funeral. She already knew his grandfather had died. Yet she had scheduled the breakup for this hour. Her comment section called her brave and a survivor.

Comments cascaded across his vision.

[Matriarch_Minx]: so proud of you queen

[GlowUp_Goddess]: u tried ur best, he CHOSE the Dim over love

[Enshrined_Envy]: wait is that ENCORE?? the Enshrined couple's son?? how did he end up like THAT

[Lux_Lowkey]: SHADOWBANNED?? unfollowing before it spreads to me

[Sigma_Shadow_99]: imagine being unlit on purpose

During the video, his follower count fell from 98 to 60, then 31, then 17.

Above the gate, the streetlamp flickered and went dark.

Whatever being shadowbanned meant, it was probably true for him.

The stream ended with the highest viewership Halo had ever had, and she gained eleven thousand new followers.

Wick stood at the edge of the grave without moving. In four months, Halo had never come down to the Dim, though he had asked her every week to come and meet Teo. The Dim disgusted her. The first time she entered the district was last week, with a camera.

For fourteen years, strangers had been asking how Wick ended up like this. Encore Cresset had once had wealthy, famous parents. After the fatal quest, the Hive had Enshrined them. Their megacorp employer, Splatbook, kept posting their old memories and kept every credit those posts earned. Accounts could not be inherited, so none of it had ever reached Wick.

Behind him, the robots finished filling the grave, and one of them flickered back to its smile.

"Please rate your experience with 5 out of 5 stars."

It was nearly dark by the time Wick walked down from the graveyard, though in the Dim district it was hard to tell where evening ended and night began.

The streetlights down here only lit up for people with enough followers. When someone with a few thousand fans walked by, the overhead lamps woke one by one, following them down the block like polite dogs, then blacking out behind them.

Wick knew the trick of walking in someone else's wake, but tonight the street was deserted, so he went home to Lantern Row in the dark past shuttered stalls and the pale blue glow of other people's windows.

He was halfway home when a notification chimed in his vision with the bright, cheerful sound the Hive used for everything, good news or bad.

[NOTICE FROM SOLACE CITY HALL]

"Dear Encore Cresset: The property at 17 Lantern Row, owned by Teo Cresset (deceased), must be transferred to a living heir. Inheritance fee: 12,000 credits. Payment due within 7 days at Solace City Hall. If unpaid, the property will be demolished and recycled immediately."

"We're sorry for your loss!"