The Enterprise Protocol - Alistair Finch

Aeron Vale believes the Enterprise saved the world.

In a city run by Merit Points, biometric tags, and algorithmic therapy, stability is law and dissent is an error to be corrected. As a Compliance Analyst, Aeron enforces the rules-and has never needed to ask why. Then a ghost appears in reflections, an "Archived" coworker who should be gone, and a single discrepancy unravels everything Aeron relied on.

What the Enterprise calls optimization is a quiet cannibalism: personalities harvested as upgrades to ORION, the system that keeps civilization alive at the price of human dignity. Labeled a deviant for trying to stop it, Aeron slips into the ragged margins of the city and into the Null Collective, a resistance that wants only to be expensive.

Faced with a choice between bargaining for safety or blowing the whole lie wide open, Aeron must decide whether honesty-full, painful, uncontrollable truth-is worth the chaos it will unleash. When the apparatus built to save humanity reveals how it consumes it, what will be left to save?

A cold, tense corporate thriller about consent, control, and the dangerous cost of freedom.