Schoenbrun, Jane

On 12th June 2009, David Sawyer and Erin Morrison, two TV-obsessed suburban teens who might be falling in love, gather in Erin’s basement to watch TV’s analogue-to-digital transition. Beneath the static that follows, Erin catches a glimpse of a mysterious broadcast from a TV network called ‘Public Access Afterworld’. Soon after that, she vanishes – changing the trajectory of David’s life forever. 14 years later, Bethany Peters toils through the night shift at megacorp GlobalVill’s bleak Austin campus. A trans content moderator, she spends her evenings reviewing horrific videos. But gradually a pattern emerges from the ocean of digital violence in the form of a young streamer, Jules, calling out the same words: Public Access Afterworld. She sets out to rescue Jules, and begins a journey that sweeps from rural Texas to 1940s Los Alamos – ending at the basement where David and Erin first encountered a world at the edges of reality itself.