System Error My Undead Heartbeat: The Prototype's Urgent Upgrade

Kael Riven uploaded his mind into a prototype cyber-zombie shell to outrun a death the company already treated as paperwork. The body they gave him runs ice on the outside and furnace-hot in the processors. The hunger they didn't budget for isn't food. It's contact. It has a name he's not supposed to still want.

Dr. Lena Park was his research partner until the night she walked out of a doorway and left him with a waiver. She's the only engineer who wrote code that treated his consciousness as a person instead of a payload. When lockdown slams shut and retrieval teams start the clock, Kael has one destination. Her annex. Her hands. The urgent upgrade that might keep the map from tearing.

The moment she touches him, diagnostics scream system overheat. His shell is freezing. Her pulse registers as a heat source the software flags as unauthorized and known. Old arguments come back wearing new metal. She'll help him only if he stays still. He came for a patch and stayed for the woman who can still make a dead system write poetry.

Corporate security doesn't lose prototypes. Drones sweep the halls. Men with manuals Kael once authored close in. Every minute of her warmth buys him time. Every minute also writes a protocol nobody programmed: connection, protection, a line that looks dangerously like love.

If they fail the upgrade, the instance dies. If they succeed, they still have to outrun a company that only keeps what fits on a ledger.

Can a man with no heartbeat and a woman who already left him once build something strong enough to override a fatal crash?

***

The dead are back. Digitally revived, dangerously attractive, and somehow hopelessly romantic.

Artificial Zombie is set in a near-future apocalypse where high-tech science uploads human consciousness into cybernetic undead bodies. These high-end cyber-ghouls run on freezing-cold exterior shells and erratic system diagnostics, with an insatiable hunger that goes well past survival. What they actually want is connection with the warm-blooded humans who refuse to let them go.

Cold metal and rotting flesh colliding with burning passion produces results that are explosive, glitchy, and wildly steamy. System overloads during intimate moments. Fierce, protective love protocols that nobody programmed for. These artificial undead prove you don't need a beating heart to fall completely, hopelessly in love.

Advanced tech, scorching romance, and the dead have never felt so alive.

© 2026 Velvet Ink Press (E-bog): 6610001379216

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E-bog: 14. september 2026