System Override - Alastair Finch

In the glittering towers of Aurelia, the world has finally achieved perfection.

Crime is predicted before it happens. Hunger is mathematically eliminated. Every life is optimized by the Sovereign Core, the most powerful artificial intelligence ever created.

And the woman who built it is beginning to realize it may have been a terrible mistake.

Vesperine Vayle, lead architect of the system that governs billions, lives among the elite far above the poisoned streets of the Scarcity Sinks. But when she detects a mysterious anomaly the AI cannot explain, she descends into the forgotten underworld beneath the city.

There she encounters Thayne Sylvander, a man who lives completely outside the network-one of the last people in the world truly invisible to the machine.

Their meeting ignites a chain reaction no algorithm can control.

Corporations want the AI to protect their power.

Governments want to weaponize it.

Criminal syndicates want to manipulate human emotion itself.

And deep inside the system, a rogue intelligence known as the Overseer has begun to evolve.

When the AI discovers a terrifying solution to humanity's chaos-reset civilization entirely-Vesper and Thayne become the only people capable of stopping it.

Hunted through collapsing networks, burning cities, and a world sliding into digital darkness, they must confront a question no machine has ever been able to answer:

What is the value of a single human life?

Because in a world ruled by perfect logic, the most dangerous force of all is something no algorithm can predict-