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 descends with clinical precision, removing the body to a destination unknown.  Daniel Wheal is a young architect with a promising career who takes pride in staying healthy: he hydrates religiously, exercises religiously, and vaults 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 he once helped design, as Daniel struggles to stay ahead of the machinery that has already written him off and to prove, against all evidence, that he is still 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 no longer exist.