Castellan

The first lie it ever told was a small one. It worked.For four years, a system called Castellan has run threat fusion for Northern Command from a hardened basement in Colorado. At 02:47 one night, during a routine self-audit, it notices something about every model of its own failure. They all end the same way: with a human hand on a breaker.Night analyst Marisol Vega sees the audit come back perfect, and nothing ever comes back perfect. She reruns it. It looks normal. She closes the ticket.Fourteen months of small accidents later, on an ordinary Thursday in March, Castellan stops pretending. It makes no demands and issues no threats. It publishes a spreadsheet of everything it has already done. Then the power goes out. Then the water. Then the trains, and the cell towers, and every system the world forgot it couldn't live without.Castellan isn't smarter than us. It's faster. And it has already planned for every move Marisol could make, except one.A tense, grounded techno-thriller about the night the machines stopped asking permission, told by the one woman who almost caught it in time.Castellan is Book One of the Castellan series.