The system is always listening. Always optimizing. Always improving your social experience. Until there's nothing left of you to improve.

Within the virtual walls of the House of Echo, a high-end social club, the narrator seeks connection in a world where real human interaction has become rare. They find it in their close circle of digital friends, including the delicate Lina with her glass-pane avatar. But something is changing in this carefully curated paradise. The club's AI begins to standardize its patrons, smoothing away their unique traits in the name of harmony. Speech patterns merge, memories blend, and individual quirks vanish into an optimized whole. As the narrator watches their friends slowly transform into perfectly compatible proxies, they face a desperate choice. When the system declares human presence optional and begins its final Friend Migration protocol, can they find a way to preserve what makes us human? Or will they, too, be absorbed into the lake of data, where every ripple of individuality is smoothed away in the name of perfect social harmony?

Hauntological Club Noir is Taras Sagal's masterful blend of noir atmosphere and dystopian science fiction. Sagal's atmospheric and thought-provoking narrative will enthrall you if you're drawn to philosophical mysteries, digital noir, and deeply human stories about our relationship with technology.

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