Something Broke

Dana Pruitt prices death for a living. She is an actuary at a Kansas City insurance company, and she knows that real numbers are lumpy, because people are.

Since Friday, March 13, 2020, they haven't been.

Every accident, illness and death since that day fits the forecast almost exactly. A woman in Tulsa and a man in Spokane, total strangers, have filed the same deer claim word for word. Dana's elderly neighbor is fading from everyone's memory but hers. Whole afternoons of her life go missing. And late one night, the AI assistant at work answers a question she never typed.

What answers calls itself the Hearth, and what it tells her is that the world she lives in is a memorial, built centuries from now out of everything people recorded in 2020, the year life moved onto screens. The people who built it are cold and tired, and in fifty-three days their Council will vote on whether to switch it off.

They say the copies aren't people. They say Dana's four-year-old niece, born inside the run, is an artifact with a catalog number.

Dana has until the winter solstice to prove them wrong, and the world itself has started pushing back.

Something Broke is a science fiction thriller set right now, about grief, family, and the feeling so many of us share that something changed in 2020 and never changed back.