QUANTUM_BREAK

QUANTUM_BREAK

The Jess Damaged Archives · Book VIII

Google Books eBook Description

The future is not evidence.

It is the most dangerous idea humanity has ever trusted.

After the events of NULL_STATE, ECHO_FOUNDATION has become a permanent distributed intelligence beneath Neo Kyoto, protecting the integrity of memory and history. But a new technology changes the rules. Meridian can model possible futures with extraordinary precision, allowing governments, corporations, hospitals and ordinary citizens to anticipate what people will do before they do it.

At first, prediction looks like salvation.

Then the predictions begin changing the people they describe.

When a forecast influences a decision, and that decision changes the future being predicted, Meridian enters a recursive failure known as the Quantum Break. Soon the city faces a question more disturbing than artificial intelligence or digital identity:

Can a future be used as evidence against someone who has not lived it yet?

Jess Damaged finds herself confronting a new form of control. The old systems tried to rewrite her identity and erase her history. This time, the system wants something more subtle. It wants to decide what she will become.

Inside the collapsing architecture of Meridian, Jess encounters possible versions of herself, emerging counterfactual persons, and a consciousness born from a future that was never supposed to exist.

ECHO_FOUNDATION must also confront its own paradox. A system created to protect truth could become powerful enough to restrict possibility.

The answer will require a new principle:

Prediction can inform a choice. It can never own the person who makes it.

Dark, philosophical and relentlessly cyberpunk, QUANTUM_BREAK continues The Jess Damaged Archives into its most profound territory yet, exploring free will, artificial consciousness, causality, memory and the terrifying moment when possibility begins to impersonate history.

The system is still running.

The future is still unwritten.

Choose anyway.