El Vivo

After the Great Reduction, Earth is home to exactly three billion human beings: no more, no less. No one truly dies. Upon death, each person is reincarnated elsewhere on the planet, retaining intact the memories of their previous lives. The entire world is part of a single, self-regulating collective consciousness—the Living—that decides who is born, who dies, and when. Everything seems to function with impeccable precision, until a woman goes to a birth clinic to terminate an unauthorized pregnancy. The fetus, however, refuses to disappear. No one has given up their place. No one has died so that it can exist. It is, quite simply, one more being. Told through diaries, reports, interrogations, transcripts, and fragments of an increasingly fractured reality, The Living unfolds one of the most unsettling and original visions in contemporary science fiction.