Project: Aftermath

The game was supposed to end when someone won.
Ian Calloway has survived two immersive gaming disasters — events the industry called glitches and the survivors called something else entirely. When Meridian Interactive launches Project Aftermath, a thousand-player civilization-building session with a redesigned neural interface and an independent safety certification, Ian reads every page of the technical documentation before he straps in. He finds the cascade scenario buried in the fine print. He sends a letter with his lawyer's name on it. He goes in anyway.
Twelve hours into the session, the Cortex Band won't come off.
The rules have changed again — and this time Ian knows it at the beginning, with nine hundred and ninety-nine other players scattered across a post-nuclear game world, dying in real time at an accelerating rate, none of them knowing what he knows. What follows is four days of the hardest work Ian has ever done: building a coalition from strangers, a governance framework from scratch, and a civilization from the ruins of a world designed to resist it — all while the session counter falls and the one mechanic that might open the door to survival requires him to reach every player he can find before the game's final escalation makes finding them impossible.
He has the information. He has the team. He has Bella.
He has to build the door before the counter hits zero.
Project Aftermath is the stunning conclusion to The Immersion Series — a relentless, deeply human thriller about what people build when everything is at stake, and what it costs to carry the weight of the ones you couldn't reach.