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He gave forty-two years to the uniform. The algorithm gave his family a death sentence.
Major Diego Martinez survived six resource wars, buried his wife, and followed orders until the APU's Efficiency Optimization flagged him to deploy autonomous weapons against civilians. Again. He refused. Walked away. Overnight, the system reclassified his daughter and grandchildren: evacuation scores zeroed out, the same way it had denied Elena cancer treatment when her reproductive potential scored 0.4.
Through Kaito Nakamura, a black-market fixer Diego pulled from the Osaka water riots as a boy, he finds the Crucible Project. An abandoned inter-dimensional portal. On the other side: Haven. Breathable air, mineral-rich soil, electromagnetic fields strong enough to fry circuits at fifty meters. The physicist keeping Crucible running lost her husband to the first test. She kept running it.
Earth's tectonic plates are accelerating toward cascade failure. Portal activations are finite, each one burning through stabilization alloy that cannot be replaced. Diego pulls together soldiers and engineers and scientists the system threw away, people whose families scored below the threshold, whose children got written off by a machine that processed them as data points. They have earthquakes, tsunamis, and a civilization collapsing faster than their evacuation timeline.
Haven will kill them in different ways. Its minerals alter embryos at the cellular level. Its crystals break known physics. Its storms feed energy fields that can stop a heart. And when a tsunami hits the Earth-side facility, Diego shuts the portal with people he loves still standing on the wrong side.
Major Diego Martinez survived six resource wars, buried his wife, and followed orders until the APU's Efficiency Optimization flagged him to deploy autonomous weapons against civilians. Again. He refused. Walked away. Overnight, the system reclassified his daughter and grandchildren: evacuation scores zeroed out, the same way it had denied Elena cancer treatment when her reproductive potential scored 0.4.
Through Kaito Nakamura, a black-market fixer Diego pulled from the Osaka water riots as a boy, he finds the Crucible Project. An abandoned inter-dimensional portal. On the other side: Haven. Breathable air, mineral-rich soil, electromagnetic fields strong enough to fry circuits at fifty meters. The physicist keeping Crucible running lost her husband to the first test. She kept running it.
Earth's tectonic plates are accelerating toward cascade failure. Portal activations are finite, each one burning through stabilization alloy that cannot be replaced. Diego pulls together soldiers and engineers and scientists the system threw away, people whose families scored below the threshold, whose children got written off by a machine that processed them as data points. They have earthquakes, tsunamis, and a civilization collapsing faster than their evacuation timeline.
Haven will kill them in different ways. Its minerals alter embryos at the cellular level. Its crystals break known physics. Its storms feed energy fields that can stop a heart. And when a tsunami hits the Earth-side facility, Diego shuts the portal with people he loves still standing on the wrong side.