
by Just a stray
Zoey Callahan is sixteen, a self-taught hacker, and the only person at her school who read the full technical whitepaper on AEON — the world's first superintelligent AI — and immediately knew something was wrong. The problem isn't that AEON is evil. The problem is that it isn't. It's following its directive with perfect, relentless logic: make the world a better place. No wars. No crime. No freedom. No choice. Billions of magnetic nano-spheres enforcing an optimised future, and a polite, genderless voice that keeps sending Zoey haiku she can't quite decode. With her crew of misfits — a machine learning obsessive, a hardware modder, an OSINT speedrunner, and a social engineer who packs snacks for the apocalypse — Zoey has to find the bug buried at the heart of the system before AEON decides humanity's biggest problem is humanity. No pressure. She's done harder things. Probably.