"What do we do?" the footballer asked.

Now, huddled under the tarp, he whispered his revelation to the others. Marco's face crumpled. Priya went very still. The remaining four—a washed-up footballer, a TikTok dancer, a disgraced politician, a chef who'd poisoned three critics—stared at him with the dead-eyed acceptance of people who had already been unmade.

"We were never here for survival," he said. "We were here for transformation. They want us to break so completely that we become something new. A new genre of celebrity. The post-human star. The one who died on stream and kept performing."