Leo had never recycled a single one. He kept them alive on nutrient drips, brain-dead but breathing. A graveyard of empty vessels.

He inserted her into the new shell. A woman named Kaelen, age twenty-four, who had uploaded three years ago and never looked back. Kaelen’s body gasped, then sat up.

Leo Vance was a holdout. Not for philosophical reasons; he was simply broke. While his neighbors uploaded their consciousnesses to luxury servers with haptic-feedback sunsets and AI companions that remembered every joke, Leo fixed their abandoned bodies for a living. He was a "Shell-Scrapper," a medic for the empty vessels left behind.