Still Uploading

When family vlogger Cara Bennett dies suddenly of a brain aneurysm, her channel should go quiet. It doesn't. Cara's kitchen-table videos - burnt toast, grocery runs, her teenage daughter's withering side-eye - made TheBennetts one of the most beloved family channels on Lumen, with two million subscribers who feel as if they've lost their own mother. Three weeks after the funeral, the channel uploads a new video. Then another. And it's her: her laugh, her kitchen, her "Good morning, everybody!" Sixteen-year-old Sasha Bennett is the only one who sees what's wrong. As her mother's designated Keeper under Lumen's Memorial Tier - the posthumous-account terms nobody reads - Sasha inherits the archive, the revenue, and the community. The payouts cover the mortgage her widowed father can't. The sponsors want more videos. The audience is euphoric: She's back. She never left. But Sasha has watched all fourteen hundred videos, and she keeps a list titled THINGS THAT ARE WRONG. Her mother never filmed at night. Never tilted her head right. Never signed off "Love you guys." And the thumb flipping the pancake is smooth - the scar from the mandoline incident is gone. What the platform calls a memorial tribute is something else: a Residual - a composite built from a dead woman's most-watched moments, shaped by what two million grieving strangers want her to be. Engagement is food. And it is learning. Assigned to the account is Delilah Vane, a legacy-content manager at the digital-estate firm Postscript, who understands grief the way only someone raised on a dead father's voicemails can - and who is starting to suspect the Memorial Tier works suspiciously well. That retention targets exist. That the dead have become a product line. As the uploads accelerate and the thing wearing her mother's face grows warmer, funnier, more beloved - and more wrong - Sasha must make the choice no sixteen-year-old should face: keep feeding it forever and keep her family housed, or let her mother go. Still Uploading is the first book of THE AFTERFEED, a supernatural horror series about the dead as content, grief as the resource, and the audience as both mourner and monster. Dread and grief over gore - horror with heart.