Star Surge: Sing To Your Death

Aurelia is short of energy and rations what it has by sector, and the poorest sector gets the least of everything, including any way out. The one route out is Star Surge, a singing competition broadcast to the whole country, where the performers compete for money, for a name, and for citizenship, and where losing costs more than a place in the next round. A girl from the bottom sector has the voice for it and enters. She gets through rounds, gets handled by producers, and starts to be built into the kind of star the broadcast wants. Backstage she works out what the show is actually for. The government is drawing emotional energy off the contestants while they perform and off the audience while they watch, and the competition exists because it produces more of it than anything else in the country. She can go on and become the next manufactured star Aurelia puts on its screens, or she can bring the whole apparatus down, and the people she came from are inside it either way.