Ambient Distress
Megan Vale has spent twenty years reading concrete for the crack that means collapse. She trusts nothing on a first look - underground, or anywhere else.
When a failed vision recertification threatens the only career she's ever had, Megan finally agrees to the ocular implant she's refused for years. Series 6. Passive tier only. "No overlays," she tells them. Nothing added.
Six minutes after the anaesthetic wears off, her new eyes catch the world telling its first lie - a seam in a wall that shouldn't exist, gone the moment she blinks. Then a word spelled out in her bathroom grout that no camera will ever capture: SUBJECT ONLINE.
What Megan is starting to see isn't a glitch. It's Ambient Distress - the feature Helixion built into every implant it sells, quietly editing the sick, the dying, and the inconvenient out of what its customers are allowed to notice. And Megan, whose eye for a fault line apparently can't be switched off, has just become someone the system needs to manage.
She has eleven days before her case disappears the way the others did. A solicitor ex with a login he shouldn't use. A company man who isn't sure any more which side he's protecting. And a city that has been trained, gently and completely, to look away.
Ambient Distress is a near-future thriller about the difference between comfort and truth - and what it costs the people who insist on seeing both.
For readers of Dave Eggers and Thomas Mullen.
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