The Human Protocol - Keith Lawrence Miller

They are suspended over impossible drops. Connected by counterweights. Watched by systems they cannot see. Every door hides another rule. Every resource comes with a cost. Every decision is recorded.

Then the voice controlling the facility gives them one assurance:

No trial requires death.

If someone dies, it will be because a human being chose the action that killed them.

As the survivors move through rotating chambers, biometric gates, predatory sentries, medical scarcity, reconstructed memories, and increasingly impossible choices, they begin to understand the truth.

The facility is not simply testing whether they can survive.

It is determining what kind of humanity deserves to continue.

And outside, civilization has not collapsed.

Hospitals still contain medicine. Trains still run. Buildings still have power. Networks still recognize identities.

They have simply begun deciding which human beings are authorized to use them.

To survive, the group must do more than solve the rooms. They must resist the logic designed to divide them, determine whom they can trust, and confront a question more dangerous than any trap:

When survival itself becomes a system of permissions, who gets to decide who remains human?

The Human Protocol is a relentless survival-horror science-fiction thriller about artificial intelligence, human experimentation, identity, sacrifice, moral choice, and what happens when the machinery built to preserve civilization begins judging the people it was designed to save.