Public Access Afterworld

Schoenbrun's debut skips between decades and worlds as the eponymous phrase appears and causes havoc and horror wherever it is heard. On 12th June 2009, David Sawyer and Erin Morrison, two lonely, TV-obsessed suburban teens who might be falling in love, gather in Erin's basement to watch TV's analogue-to-digital transition. Beneath the static that follows, Erin catches a glimpse of a mysterious broadcast from a TV network called 'Public Access Afterworld'. Soon after that, she vanishes - changing the trajectory of David's life forever. Fourteen years later, Bethany Peters toils through the night shift at megacorp GlobalVill's bleak Austin campus. A trans content moderator, she spends her evenings reviewing an endless stream of horrific videos. But gradually a pattern emerges from the ocean of digital violence in the form of a young streamer, Jules, calling out the same words: Public Access Afterworld. When Bethany ignores the guidance of her corporate overseers and sets out to rescue Jules, she begins an epic journey that sweeps from rural Texas to the heart of American darkness in 1940s Los Alamos - and all the way back to that basement where David and Erin first encountered a world at the edges of reality itself.