Hellelujah - Patrick T Kilgallon

The lake house was supposed to save them.

A winter retreat for The Squiggs-five young musicians desperate to write their first album-promised quiet, evergreen air, and a break from the noise of the world. Their bags are light, their instruments delivered by the World Reset Foundation, and their only connection to the outside is the thumbshells they carry... and the AI inside them that remembers far too much.

Inside the house, brilliance collides with chaos.

The band tries to write, to collaborate, to make something worthy of their rising fame. But harmony is impossible in the year 2113, when no disabled birth shall be borne, and every life is measured by the global law.

As the pressures deepen, so do the fractures between them.

Old wounds resurface. And the lake house-meant to be a sanctuary-becomes a crucible where truth, art, and survival twist together.

In this world, creation is rebellion.

And hope is the first thing to burn.