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The House That Paid Its Own Bills

FictionElizabeth Maher

In this speculative fiction story set in 2075, digital afterlives have become normalized infrastructure where the deceased continue to generate economic value through subscriptions and automated transactions, creating a society where financial algorithms keep people functionally immortal regardless of biological death. Elizabeth Maher's award-winning narrative explores how automation and data commodification blur the boundary between life and death, using a house that pays its own bills as a metaphor for systems that perpetuate themselves independent of human existence.

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