Autonomy Score
Upmarket Speculative Thriller | In Progress
Eden Hale is a star auditor at the Civic Stability Bureau, where the government maintains order through "wellness." Everyone has a mandated AI Companion, and most people stay single because couplehood triggers "dependency drift" protocols. Eden's job is to spot early pairing signals and authorize supportive relocations. She believes she's preventing harm.
Then a ten-minute power outage locks Eden in her secure suite with Noah Vance, the contractor installing the Bureau's newest sensors. They barely speak. They don't touch. But Eden's heart rate spikes, her gaze patterns shift, and the system records the moment as a high-variance event.
By the next morning, Noah is reclassified as a transient threat and scheduled for "processing," a transfer that erases him from the city's employment and social map. When Eden tries to halt the order through official channels, the Bureau turns its benevolent gaze on her instead. Her questions become symptoms. Her competence becomes fixation. A Support Liaison opens a "stabilization" file, and the same language Eden has used on others is suddenly used to justify protective custody, for her own safety.
Eden goes rogue the only way she knows how: with documentation. She allies with a sidelined Internal Controls officer and a civil rights attorney to do the one thing the Bureau cannot normalize into a wellness note. She sues them. To save Noah, Eden must prove the Bureau is laundering enforcement through compulsory interfaces and euphemisms, using hidden "normalization windows" to purge low-protection cohorts and boost stability metrics. If she fails, Noah disappears into a facility that does not exist on public maps, and Eden becomes the Bureau's next tidy success story.
AUTONOMY SCORE is standalone with series potential.
EXCERPT
Day 1, Monday, 8:12 a.m.
Eden Hale liked Mondays because the building liked Mondays.
The lobby ran on fresh polish and fresh faces. The security gates blinked green more often than red. People showed up early, coffee in hand, compliant in posture. Even the air felt newly filtered, as if the weekend had been scrubbed out.
Up on sixteen, Civic Stability did what it always did: turned human mess into tidy categories.
Eden’s meeting room was a glass rectangle with a white-noise strip humming along the baseboard. It was meant to make you feel private while ensuring you never were. Pale wood table. Ergonomic chairs. A water carafe already sweating into a neat circle. The Bureau seal sat in the corner of the wall screen, small and official, a reminder that this work was sanctioned.
Three people sat around the table. All of them looked as though they slept well.
Eden had the case file open on her tablet, but she kept her hands folded in her lap, as if the less she touched the file, the less it could touch her back.
“Support-first intervention,” her supervisor said, eyes on the summary. Mara Sato’s voice was calibrated to soften consequences. Eden had learned that tone was part of policy. “Worker exhibits dependency drift. Repeated unlicensed clustering. Co-regulation indicators. Resource entanglement probability above threshold.”
The language arrived clean, like a form letter. It always did.
Across from Eden, a man from Eligibility, Jonah Feld, tapped his pen against his notebook. Not impatience. Cadence. He kept time with the work the way some people kept time with prayer.
Eden focused on what she could confirm. “Facilities associate in North Annex,” she said. “Badge history shows repeated linger time with the same individual. Lunch overlap. End-of-day overlap.”
Mara smiled the way you smiled at neat handwriting. “Exactly. Pattern consolidation.”
Eden had been trained to treat patterns like weather. Not moral. Not personal. Simply there.
Still, she found herself scrolling to the notes, because notes were where people bled through categories.
The associate had written in a mandatory wellness intake:
It helps to talk to someone who understands. I’m not doing anything wrong. I just feel better when I’m not alone.