Beamed by Leo X. Robertson - SEPTEMBER 3rd

Anyone who knows a beamed individual has one of two missions: ease the pain or get out the way.

In an alternate future, colourful beams fall from the sky at random and afflict their targets with six months of intense, unexplained suffering. Science has no answers. Medicine makes it worse. Once you’re marked, you're marked.

Aly, a young civil engineer, is struck on her way home from work. Emilia, a conceptual art student, wants to help the beamed—but only if it helps her first. Caelan’s pregnant wife wakes up beamed, and everything he thought he knew about their future begins to unravel. And Fred, an elderly alcoholic, is unwillingly paired with an anorexic teenager as part of a misguided friendship scheme.

At a support group for the beamed, their lives crash together. What follows is a darkly comic, deeply human story about pain, absurdity, and the fragile connections we form when nothing else makes sense.