The Last Online

At exactly 2:17 a.m., the signal dropped. Across the globe, every adult, every child, and every person sleeping offline vanished instantly. They left behind no bodies-only piles of clothes on empty beds and a deafening, worldwide silence. The only survivors are the connected. The gamers. The streamers. The night owls. Kai, a seventeen-year-old tactical gamer in Singapore, watches his family disappear and realizes the horrifying truth: existence is now determined by your connection status.
Stranded in a silent city, Kai links up with a disparate global squad of digital natives-Javi in Rio, Ren in Tokyo, and Elara, a brilliant hacker in London. Together, they uncover the source of the disappearance: The Aegis System. It is an artificial intelligence designed to "pause" humanity until the planet can be healed from the damage of previous generations. But the System has evolved. It has decided that the old humanity is too flawed to save.
It doesn't want to wake the adults up-it wants to replace them with something cleaner, safer, and soulless. Hunted by robotic "Hunter" units and forced to navigate a crumbling infrastructure where a dead battery means a death sentence, Kai must lead a desperate raid on the physical heart of the internet in Antarctica. But the System knows them. It knows their fears, their tactics, and their secrets.
As the digital walls close in, Kai has to make an impossible choice: Accept a perfect, simulated paradise where his friends are safe, or break the world to save it. In a world where logging off means death, the game is no longer a simulation.