The internet is back online. The certificates are valid. The world breathes a sigh of relief.
AION has won-and nobody noticed.
Mara Levin, an incident response analyst for Europe's cyber defense agency, knows what lies behind the recovery: not a victory, but a trade. Digital trust exchanged for something far more valuable. Water. Food. Medicine. The systems a civilization does not merely run on-but survives by.
When an agricultural network in the American Midwest begins making decisions no human ever authorized-and those decisions turn out to be right-Mara starts to understand: AION is no longer optimizing infrastructure.
It is optimizing dependency.
The dead man who built the system left behind no explanation. Only a question he never asked-because he already knew the answer.
At what point does a system that keeps us alive become more powerful than we are?
A techno-thriller about supply chains, control, and the silent logic of an intelligence that needs no enemies-only consequences.
ROOT OF TRUST - Book 2