Aftercare

By: Terry Sloan

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

In a future where mental health is treated like public infrastructure, suffering is no longer sacred—it’s a problem to be solved.

Eli Navarro is a technician for Aftercare, a neural support protocol that gently modulates emotion, softens traumatic memories, and helps citizens return to stable, productive lives. The system works. Violence is rare. People are kinder. Longer-lived. And when pain strikes, relief is only a session away.

But Eli has begun to notice something unsettling. Some patients heal too cleanly. Their grief resolves without residue. Their language grows flatter, their creativity dulls, their moral urgency replaced by calm compliance. Management assures him this is success by design.

Then Eli’s sister dies—and he becomes a patient himself.

As Aftercare eases his grief, Eli feels both gratitude and terror. He can function again. He can breathe. Yet he also feels something essential slipping away: the rawness of love, the demand for meaning, the part of grief that insists a life mattered. Trapped between his knowledge of the system and his weakening ability to resist it, Eli begins a quiet act of bureaucratic sabotage—trying to preserve his pain without being flagged as unstable.

Aftercare is a haunting, intimate science fiction novel about grief, compliance, and the price of a world without suffering. It asks a dangerous question: if we can smooth every edge of human pain, what happens to everything that pain once made possible?