Sub-Sector Zero

Meo didn't answer the emails. He slept through the deadline, the way he'd slept through most things since his last freelance client fired him at 2:14 in the morning. When he finally woke up, the city of Seattle was silent. Buses idled at their stops with the doors open. Delivery vans blinked their hazards in empty intersections. Every person on Earth was gone, and the lights were still on. At first, it's the greatest long weekend in history. Meo takes a penthouse suite at the Grand Sovereign, hauls six dream cars on a stolen Peterbilt, and builds a yurt in the middle of a million-square-foot warehouse stocked with Wagyu, Swiss chocolate, and every heist movie ever made. But boredom has a way of turning into curiosity. A trail of clues leads him to AetherDyne, a fortified campus in the hills, and then to Galactagon, a vast server complex buried under a mountain in the Cascades. There he learns the truth. Humanity didn't vanish. It uploaded. Nearly eight billion minds walked calmly into white pods and joined a collective consciousness, and Meo is the only one left outside. Then the grid starts failing, and the machine begins to squeeze. Inside the collective, a silent compactor is rounding off anyone who doesn't fit the average, and a stubborn hydrologist named Elena is running out of places to hide. With a rescued dog, a growing army of household robots, and an android who refuses to let him take the easy way out, Meo has to decide whether a man who has spent his whole life avoiding hard things can become the one thing standing between eight hundred million people and their erasure. Funny, tender, and unexpectedly profound, Sub-Sector Zero by Morgan Burns is a story about the end of the world, the people we leave behind, and the strange, stubborn beauty of staying human.