Ethan Reyes built a machine that writes the perfect eulogy.
Feed it a name and it returns the truest thing ever written about that person - specific, intimate, devastatingly kind. Elegy was going to make grief bearable. It was going to make Ethan rich.
Then the people it writes about start to die. Not the grieving. The subjects. A man reads his own beautiful, unpublished eulogy on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday the words have come true.
The machine isn't predicting who dies. It's deciding - and the only thing that pulls the trigger is being believed.
Ethan has two hundred and eight names in a queue, a buyer who wants to scale it to ninety million, and a sister who stopped speaking to him six years ago. He has until the machine finishes writing about the wrong person to work out how you fight a thing that kills with the truth.
You can't argue with a eulogy. Everyone agrees.