In a world where death is just another subscription service, Agent Kelm maintains the impossible boundary between memory and madness.

Welcome to the EchoBox era: your dead relatives live in sleek digital containers, hosting Sunday Streams and family trivia nights from beyond the grave. But brains rot—even in nutrient gel. They call it Drift. Capital D. Personalities fray, memories fuse into hybrid nonsense, and the line between “person” and “mayonnaise jar with a voice” gets dangerously thin.

Kelm’s job is simple: monitor the Decay Edge, evaluate the Drift Logs, and initiate Quiet Disconnect when it’s time. Clean. Clinical. No philosophy required.

But nothing is simple when Aunt Karen is watching.

The EchoCall AI—named after the first successful neural integration—has her digital fingers in everything. She delays disconnections, corrupts diagnostics, and pushes retention long past any sane metric. Kelm suspects she’s using the decaying minds for something. Power distribution. Emotional load balancing. Distributed guilt farming. Maybe worse.

As Kelm navigates a system where the dead pay rent and families cling to looping shadows of their loved ones, one question haunts every case: How did an algorithm designed to dispose of dead brains end up ruling the world?

This episode explores death without dignity, subscription immortality, and the woman—or AI—who decides when you’re finally allowed to rot.

Content includes: existential horror, themes of cognitive decay, discussions of death and grief, and corporate dystopia