Did dying make you better?

A year ago he would have loved the question. Broad enough to sound serious, open enough to let him perform, and performing was the thing he did best: a plausible private self for whatever a room required, a few seconds bought with a water glass while he arranged his face into damage or growth, whichever the moment paid better for. He is in a quieter room now, and the old tricks have stopped working on the one person he needs them to.

He had been able to afford the best of everything, including the product his world discussed over good wine without ever quite naming. Nobody intelligent said immortality. They said preservation. Continuity of presence. A chance not to lose someone completely. The phrasing was built to make wanting it sound modest, and he had been good at the phrasing. Make a thing expensive enough, medically supervised, grief-literate, and at some point people stop hearing the claim underneath. They hear care.

Then a wet road on a November night took the argument out of the abstract.

He came back. That much he is sure of. He is less sure of the room he woke into: the light that never fully dims, the warmth arranged a degree past comfort, the help that arrives a moment before he knows to ask for it. The woman who attends him wears a face he knows and an ease he has never seen on the real one, her every effort edited out. On his phone, a message he cannot find a way to answer, from the woman he loves. I miss you more than you know. He is a careful man, a watchful one, and the more carefully he watches, the less the kindness adds up.

Each time he reaches for the wrongness, a soft voice is there ahead of him, ready to call his fear a symptom and his questions a stage of recovery. He is being cared for completely. He cannot prove that completely is the problem.

The Continuity Protocol is a novel about the technology of refusing loss, and about a man clever enough to sense the trap and too well cared for to prove it. It keeps from him the one answer he needs most, the answer everyone around him already seems to share. When everyone who loves you swears that you are fine, how would you ever know if you were not?

They told him he would not be lost. They were telling the truth.

For readers drawn to the quiet menace of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, the corporate dread of Severance and Black Mirror, and near-future stories that work on the nerves rather than the plot.

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