My Girlfriend Was Worth 230 Million

Synopsis

My name is Michael Carter, and I'm a mortician. My job is to help the dead leave this world with their dignity intact. But three months ago, I started noticing things that were anything but dignified. Under the skin of some corpses, blurry strings of numbers would flicker by like a cheap LED screen glitching out. I thought I was just cracking under the pressure, until today, when I received a very special "body"—Richard Lane, the richest man in the city. The problem was, the morning business news had just reported him at a public event. What was even stranger, when I leaned in close, I clearly saw a blood-red line of data flash beneath the skin behind his ear: [User ID: 00749 | User Value: 420 million dollars | Status: Forced Purge]. At the end of that data stream was an encrypted file packet. On impulse, I cracked it using the internal network, and my heart went cold. There was only one list inside, and my girlfriend Eva Lane's name was on it.