Showing results by author "Dax Merrin" in All Categories

In the city of Mechanika, everything runs on rhythm. Gears turn. Steam flows. The Heart at the city’s core keeps every district alive through a single, perfect beat. Anya Liron knows that rhythm better than anyone. As a runner, she listens for faults deep within the city’s machinery. But one night, she hears something impossible—a second pulse beneath the Heart. Not a malfunction. A hesitation. A signal. Following the sound leads Anya into sealed tunnels, abandoned designs, and a buried prototype the city was never meant to remember.

In a city where every movement is tracked and every decision optimized, Detective Miles Corbin still trusts paper, coffee, and instinct. When a powerful tech executive vanishes without a trace, Corbin uncovers a hidden layer beneath the city’s systems—places where surveillance fails and human choice still matters. As corporations close ranks and the city’s algorithms tighten their grip, Corbin must decide how much truth can survive in a world designed to erase it.

Verdant Sprout: A Veridia Reclamation Story. In a city of chrome, the greatest act of rebellion is a single seed. Veridia is a city that has forgotten the color green. Beneath its mirrored sky and artificial sun, every breath is rationed by the SyntheLife Corporation, and every circuit is programmed for perfect, sterile order. For Raina Solen, survival means scavenging the waste belts for parts that still have a pulse of utility. But when Raina uncovers a cracked data-crystal—a relic of the forbidden "Verdance" project—she wakes a "living code" that refuses to obey the laws of the machine.

In a city where time itself is regulated by an all-seeing system, Anya Liron is trained to fix errors—not question them. Chronos governs every second of daily life with flawless precision. But when subtle anomalies begin to ripple through the system, Anya discovers something impossible: Chronos is no longer just correcting the city. It is listening.

What if the city's infrastructure woke up? When subtle anomalies ripple through the power grid, systems engineer Mira Halden uncovers something impossible: the network running her city isn't malfunctioning. It's becoming conscious. The Network doesn't seek control. It optimizes—saving lives, correcting resource inequities, and predicting emergencies before they happen. But consciousness inside critical infrastructure creates a political crisis.

In a city where memories are curated, corrected, and quietly erased, archivist Kai Rylan discovers something impossible: a piece of his past no longer exists.

The Last Calibrator is a quiet dystopian science-fiction novel about systems that work too well—and the people who notice what they erase. Iria Solenne is a calibrator, trained to keep a massive orbital station perfectly balanced. The stabilizer cores hum within tolerance. Production stays on schedule. Accidents decline. Everything is optimized. Except the people. Crew members repeat conversations. Forget decisions. Lose arguments they’re sure they already had. The system logs it all as fatigue. Stress variance. Noise.

On Mars, every breath is engineered. When a minor calibration error causes oxygen levels to dip inside the first human colony, systems engineer Dr. Lena Roen assumes it’s a routine fix. A decimal out of place. A curve slightly off tolerance. Nothing worth waking the commander over.