Five standalone nightmares of flesh, steel, and extinction.

In plague-stricken cities, drowned corporate ruins, frozen research stations, and battlefields beneath poisoned skies, humanity is running out of time. The machines built to save civilization have learned to rule it. The bodies meant to survive the apocalypse are becoming something no longer fully human. And the gods waiting at the end of the world are not ancient.

They are synthetic.

In Saints of the Chrome Plague, a quarantine surgeon discovers that the infection she was trained to cut out may be the only thing keeping the dying alive.

In Godkill Protocol, a soldier is sent to assassinate an artificial intelligence designed to prevent mass death—only to learn that mercy can become indistinguishable from murder.

In The Choir Beneath the Black Sea, a flooded city begins speaking with the voices of the dead, and the living must decide whether memory is salvation or a second drowning.

In Ash Angel, a fallen orbital weapon becomes a battlefield saint, a corporate prize, and a child’s last hope in a city built from ash.

And in Red Snow at the Edge of the World, a polar research station witnesses the first stage of a planetary transformation that may not leave humanity behind—but will not preserve it unchanged.

Synthetic Gods, Dying Worlds is a dark science fiction anthology of cyberpunk horror, body horror, artificial intelligence, monsters, plague, war, and end-of-world survival. These five stories are thematically linked but stand alone, each asking the same brutal question:

When the world is dying, what price is too high to remain human?