Everlast Awakening: A Life Given

At seventy-four, Elias Ward dies believing the world was right about him: lazy, forgettable, late to his own life. Then he opens his eyes inside a medical pod and discovers he is thirteen years old. The lifetime he remembers - every failure, every job, every heartbreak, even the daughter he raised - was delivered by Everlast Learning Systems in less than two weeks. His parents bought him a lesson. Everlast gave him sixty-one years. Eli is not the only child who remembers growing old, Samir remembers fatherhood. Mateo remembers saving lives and losing the woman he loved. Asha remembers a brilliant career and a marriage she broke. Together, the four begin searching for the people from the lives they were told never happened. What they find is worse than a simulation. The people inside those worlds remember them too. Now four children carrying centuries of memory must expose the company selling human futures, wake the sleepers Everlast cannot safely disconnect, and answer a question no machine was designed to ask: if a false life can love you back, who gets to call it false?