Jane Schoenbrun Public Access Afterworld

Annotation

On 12th June 2009, David Sawyer and Erin Morrison, two lonely, 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. Fourteen 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 an endless stream of horrific videos. But gradually a pattern emerges in the form of a young streamer, Jules, calling out the same words: Public Access Afterworld. When Bethany sets out to rescue Jules, she begins an epic journey that sweeps from rural Texas to 1940s Los Alamos - and all the way back to that basement where David and Erin first encountered a world at the edges of reality itself.