Communion

Automatic Computing Engine Anthology | North Ridge Studios

You were never meant to be alone.

Drayton Baxter is a man with nothing left to lose. Depressed and drowning in a mouldering apartment after his mother’s death, he is offered a radical escape from his crushing isolation: Communion, a revolutionary biotech company promising an end to the epidemic of isolation through a biological, mycelial bond. One pill connects you to a network of minds where grief is a shared thing, every joyful feeling is amplified, and loneliness is effectively extinct. But as the threads of the collective consciousness tighten, Drayton discovers that a life without pain may mean a life without a self. In a place where every thought is public and every dissent is "smoothed" away, Drayton must decide if the warmth of the community is worth the price of his identity, especially when he discovers that the woman he loves might have been silenced for knowing the truth.