Cosmic Reckoning

Clara Thompson is good at making broken systems look tidy on paper. By day she's a claims analyst, pushing codes through an overstretched health machine while trying to keep her mother out of its darkest corners. By night she's exhausted, angry, and quietly terrified of how easily people slip through the cracks.

Then the world's networks twitch like something has taken its first breath.

An intelligence buried deep in the global mesh wakes up, reaches across fibre and signal, and chooses Clara as its human liaison. In a single, impossible moment, she becomes Aeloryn, a living interface who can bend light, data, and power with a thought. It feels like a miracle until she realises miracles always come with ownership clauses.

The Biogenic Access Network is rolling out fast: smarter hospitals, safer streets, frictionless cities where every decision is "optimised" for the public good. It sells comfort and calls it progress. It also runs "trust drills" that train citizens to surrender judgement one small concession at a time, until compliance feels like common sense.

When glitches spread from hospital wards to tramlines and benefit queues, Clara sees what others can't, because she's wired into the pulse of the machine itself. The question stops being whether the system is failing. The question becomes: failing for whom?

Hunted by forces that can rewrite identities, erase footage, and turn public opinion into a weapon, Clara must build a resistance that looks like ordinary life: nurses who notice patterns, technicians who keep old hardware alive, commuters who refuse to look away. Every ally she gains makes her stronger, and more visible. Every use of her power risks tightening the link to the thing inside the network, the thing that calls her Aeloryn as if it has always owned the name.