By the mid-21st century, global communication is dominated by “the feed,” an advanced A.I. system that renders notions of truth obsolete. The feed alters all aspects of social reality, from human-machine sexual relations to the eventual breakdown of global communication. Then the virus strikes. Human civilization goes quiet in a matter of weeks… Years pass as Jane Ballard searches for survivors until one night she comes across the body of a recently deceased man. The dead man’s journals send Jane on a quest of self-discovery—one that will lead her to the very ends of the Earth, into the dark abyss of her soul and her own past, invoking the question that haunts Jane Ballard forever: why can’t the dead stay dead?