The Black Box Chronicles Kickstarter is just hours away from ending, having already raised more than 1000 percent of its original goal. What can be said, other than people really want to see a sci-fi anthology answer the question of what happens when we die? Other than, if that doesn't convince you, perhaps Popverse's exclusive preview of a story by Eryk Donovan will.

Black Box Chronicles is the first fruit of a partnership between graphic novel publisher Magnetic Press and Horrible Future!, the production company founded by Mark Schey and Chris Northrop, who have experience on projects such as X-Files Online and Critical Role: Vox Machina Origins. The book is a collection of 15 short comic strips set in a shared futuristic universe - the Black Box Universe, perhaps unsurprisingly - where humanity has used its technological might to solve almost all of life's problems... and has now turned its attention to the death problem, so to speak.

"We love hard sci-fi like The Expanse and thought pieces like Black Mirror," said Schey in a statement about the project. "If Black Mirror is a shadowy reflection of humanity using technology, the Black Box is what happens after the technology kills you. We wanted to create stories of that caliber but focused on a destination that few have dared to explore: the barrier between life and death. We wanted to take a scientific – albeit fantastic – approach to a subject that is normally seeped in the supernatural, exploring some alternate ideas about what happens in the last moments of a person’s life from a hard sci-fi perspective. While we don’t pose any concrete answers, our stories follow future explorers committed to figuring it out once and for all.”

Contributors to the anthology include David Mack, Michael Avon Oeming, David Messina, Taki Soma, and Zach Howard, as well as Eryk Donovan, who contributes the story you can read below.

The Kickstarter campaign for Black Box Chronicles ends at 6pm Eastern on June 2. You can find out more details right here.

Science fiction has a history of predicting the future. While we wait for real life to catch up to the Black Box Chronicles, why not watch the Predicting the Future Technology panel from NYCC 2022?