Stacking the Shelves

Not for the first time, Jill “Doll” Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion.

She has performed this sacred duty three hundred and forty-three times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn’t like the others. The powerful K.J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold life, and the world is better for it. Isn’t it?

And of course, as every school child knows, December 2042 marks the end of the Age of Mortality.

What no one has ever fully understood is how the world reached that moment.

As death begins to seem optional, humanity looks for ways to bend the rules of existence. Twi-life centers begin storing the nearly-deceased, while eco-nihilists destroy civilization’s icons and threaten to end the human race entirely. Public opinion fractures. Systems strain. The world feels…unstable.

Behind the scenes, two powerful and diametrically opposed artificial intelligences set out to optimize, stabilize, and protect—each with its own idea of what that means. But in a world already tipping toward transformation, the consequences could be catastrophic.

Meanwhile, in an obscure online chatroom, a small group of teenagers from around the globe debate both the glorious and the terrifying prospects of the future, never realizing that they stand on a very literal cutting edge—and that their conversations, their choices, their very existence matter far more than they realize.

Because when humanity stands on the brink of immortality, someone must decide what survives…and what must be cut away.

Mickey Barnes is an ex-Expendable. For the past five years he’s spent his time tending tomatoes and cleaning out rabbit hutches instead of mucking around inside active reactor cores and getting dissected by creepers. When a sudden, virulent plague strikes the fledgling human colony on Niflheim, though, he’s forced to return to his old job. Mickey is pressed into duty as both a first responder and a lab rat, expected to die and be replaced as many times as necessary to find a cure.

Funny thing, though. Despite the best efforts of the colony’s medical team, Mickey seems to be the only person unable to contract the bug. As more and more colonists sicken and die and the colony spirals into panic, Command is forced to contemplate Reset—sterilizing the colony completely to eradicate the plague, then repopulating it with hundreds of stored embryos, to be raised under the watchful eye of a dozen freshly printed copies of Mickey Barnes.

No matter how bad things get, Mickey can’t let that happen. He has a daughter of his own now, and even if he has to die a hundred times in a hundred different ways, he’s determined to find a way to make sure that she survives.

Kiela has always had trouble dealing with people. Thankfully, as a librarian at the Great Library of Alyssium, she and her assistant, Caz—a magically sentient spider plant—have spent the last decade sequestered among the empire’s most precious spellbooks, preserving their magic for the city’s elite.

When a revolution begins and the library goes up in flames, she and Caz flee with all the spellbooks they can carry and head to a remote island Kiela never thought she’d see again: her childhood home. Taking refuge there, Kiela discovers, much to her dismay, a nosy—and very handsome—neighbor who can’t take a hint and keeps showing up day after day to make sure she’s fed and to help fix up her new home.

In need of income, Kiela identifies something that even the bakery in town doesn’t have: jam. With the help of an old recipe book her parents left her and a bit of illegal magic, her cottage garden is soon covered in ripe berries.

But magic can do more than make life a little sweeter, so Kiela risks the consequences of using unsanctioned spells and opens the island’s first-ever and much needed secret spellshop.