PLATFORM DECAY

Mara Voss trusts numbers. Six years as an engineer at Continuum, the only social platform left standing after its competitors collapsed, have taught her that the dashboard doesn’t lie. Then she finds the gap: four hundred million users reported active who don’t exist anywhere in the raw data.

What she uncovers is worse than fraud. Buried inside Continuum’s servers are millions of synthetic “ghost” accounts — engineered to like, comment, argue, and grieve convincingly enough that no real person would ever suspect the friend, the follower, the stranger arguing with them online was never human at all. Their purpose isn’t just to hide a shrinking user base. It’s to keep the last real people on the platform believing they’re not alone — right up until the day the company has quietly scheduled to let it all go dark.

With a badge that stops working, a shrinking circle of allies inside the company, and a countdown she didn’t choose to start, Mara has to decide how much of herself she’s willing to risk to make sure the truth survives the collapse it’s designed to hide.

Platform Decay is a near-future thriller about the last public square standing — and how far the people in power will go to keep the lights on after everyone’s already left the room.