Audio only
The Mercy Clause
Stories from a Society That Perfected Death and Broke the LivingBy Ivy Q. Abyss
Length6h 36m
About this audiobook
In a world where no one dies by accident and every citizen knows the precise date of their death, the government calls it mercy. The people who must live through it know better.
The Mercy Clause is a haunting dystopian speculative fiction collection about a future that solved death on paper, only to break the living in practice. At adulthood, each person must choose one of two legally sanctioned lifespans: sixty years in a flawless, unaging body that cannot be killed, or one hundred and twenty years in a normally aging body that cannot die early from disease, injury, catastrophe, or misfortune. Death arrives peacefully, on schedule, and without appeal.
What begins as a technological and ethical miracle becomes a bureaucratic nightmare. Unkillable bodies become resources. Long‑lived elders become liabilities. Time becomes a privilege, usefulness becomes currency, and suffering becomes a logistical problem for society to manage as efficiently as possible. When death is perfected, life becomes the part that hurts.
Through quiet psychological horror, literary science fiction, and emotionally devastating speculative storytelling, The Mercy Clause examines the fallout of regulated mortality: lovers divided by mismatched time horizons, parents forced to witness their children die early (or late), emergency workers who can endure disasters because they cannot die, and families who grieve decades before the loss actually arrives. These stories reveal the psychological, cultural, and ethical violence that emerges when survival becomes mandatory and death becomes a controlled luxury.
Perfect for readers who crave dystopian fiction, existential sci‑fi, literary speculative fiction, and post‑human psychological horror, this collection will resonate with fans of Kazuo Ishiguro, Ling Ma, Ted Chiang, Emily St. John Mandel, and Ken Liu, while carving out a space uniquely its own.
Themes explored include: scheduled mortality, aging, longevity ethics, post‑human survival, medical regulation, bureaucratic dystopia, grief under certainty, institutional control, usefulness, family strain, love under mismatched lifespans, and the cultural economics of time.
The Mercy Clause asks the most uncomfortable question of all:
If we could perfect death, why would we expect life to stay human?
Emotionally intelligent, philosophically rich, and profoundly unsettling, The Mercy Clause belongs on the shelf of every reader who enjoys speculative futures with teeth — stories that linger, stories that ache, and stories that refuse to let go.
Audiobook details
GenreScience Fiction, Biography and Memoir
Length6 hrs 36 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateJan 20, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Introduction
86. The Hundred, Year Caregiver
2Get Another Book In The Our Lonely Path Series For Free
97. Bruises Don’t Fade
31. INTRODUCTION
108. The Long Recovery
42. Ashfall City
119. The Unaging Prisoner
53. The Heirloom use
1210. The Hospice Promise
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64. Unbreakable Patient
1311. The Fire Walk
75. The Last Classroom
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