In the city of Port Union, society’s fear of death has taken on new dimensions: the moment someone “endpoints,” the living flee and a crack unit known as Surge arrives within minutes, removing the body to a destination unknown. Daniel Wheal is a young architect who takes pride in staying healthy: hydrating, exercising, vaulting through the city by way of parkour.  So no one is more surprised than he when, as he lounges in a park with friends, Surge identifies him as one of the dead.  What follows is a flight across the urban landscape that he once helped design, as Daniel struggles to stay ahead of the machinery that has written him off and to prove that he is alive. At once a propulsive chase and a haunting meditation, The Occident asks what it means to live in a world determined to deny death—and what it takes to confront our own mortality when the system insists we don’t exist.