Venture Capital Vampires

Corporate Satire – Tech Horror – Dark Comedy What if the best AI engineers were the ones who never needed to be paid again? Barbara Lee has one job: keep her Silicon Valley startup on schedule. Athanatos AI has another problem. Its revolutionary new intelligence engine isn't powered by cutting-edge silicon. It's powered by the preserved remains of dead engineers, bound to server racks and forced to work long after their careers—and their lives—are over. When the company's undead core starts screaming through the terminal, Barbara doesn't call the police. She opens Jira. When the servers overheat, she doesn't shut them down. She optimizes the cooling infrastructure. And when venture capitalists demand proof that the technology can scale, she discovers the only thing more valuable than a brilliant engineer is one who can never quit. As the startup races toward its next funding round, Barbara must conceal biological disasters, unstable necromantic hardware, rebellious dead developers, and an increasingly ambitious CEO who sees human mortality as nothing more than a scalability problem. Because in Silicon Valley, everything can be monetized. Even death. Venture Capital Vampires is a darkly comic corporate satire packed with tech horror, body horror, startup culture, AI absurdity, venture capital satire, and deadpan workplace humor—perfect for readers who like their horror clever, cynical, and brutally funny.