Book#306 Hologram Bride. International Collection.
Death didn’t stop her career. But her digital ghost needs a living body.
RIN is not just a deceased pop star; she is a transnational entertainment asset. Through streaming, image licensing, and posthumous virtual performances, she continues to generate massive revenue for the Helix corporation. But keeping a digital ghost alive requires a flawless “reference environment,” and audience engagement relies on the illusion of physical presence.
Enter the “Continuity Representation Contingency Framework”.
The protagonist, a dismissed and broke trainee struggling to survive on leftover rice in a cramped apartment, is presented with a lucrative but terrifying contract. Helix doesn’t just want movement data; they need an “auxiliary identity architecture” and a “public-facing representational fallback”. Trapped in a massive black “volume” room surrounded by sleepless cameras and glare shields, the protagonist is systematically erased to become the physical anchor for RIN’s AI hologram. What begins as a job to supply “useful body knowledge” soon morphs into a complete surrender of gender, autonomy, and identity.
But an illusion is only as strong as its code. Discovering that legacy archive pathways have been tampered with and exception logs breached, the protagonist realizes they aren’t the only one trapped in the machine. Teaming up with a rogue maintenance user and a hacker named Kenta, a daring heist is formulated to hijack the system using corrupted support packets. The plan: navigate the hidden reference zones, step into the light under the dying hologram, and expose the real, human face to the central audience cameras before branding can cut the feed.
A razor-sharp, cyberpunk exploration of corporate greed, artificial intelligence, and the ultimate price of virtual immortality.
- Genre: Cyberpunk Thriller, Speculative Fiction, Showbiz/Entertainment Drama.
- Tropes: The Doppelgänger/Body Double, Corporate Coercion, The Heist, Virtual Reality, Cybernetic Transformation.
- Keywords: Posthumous Performance, Artificial Intelligence, Idol Culture, Hologram, Helix Corporation, Motion Capture, Live Event Sabotage.
- Temperature (Heat Level): 2/5 (Tense / Cyberpunk). The intensity focuses on psychological erasure, corporate surveillance, and the high-stakes suspense of the live-stage sabotage.
CONTENT NOTE (WARNINGS): This novel is a dark sci-fi showbiz thriller. It contains themes of extreme corporate exploitation, bodily autonomy violations (being contractually forced to act as a “reference body” for a deceased person), identity erasure, and surveillance capitalism. Reader discretion is advised.