The Cost of Knowing: A Foldpoint Novel
Humanity's greatest breakthrough was never meant to be quiet.
When Foldpoints make faster-than-light travel practical, expansion accelerates beyond caution. Distance collapses. Exploration scales. For the first time in history, humanity moves through the galaxy fast enough to be noticed.
The experimental vessel Aletheia is sent to test the limits of Fold travel. Her crew expects anomalies. What they encounter instead is evaluation.
As the ship enters Fold-adjacent space, prediction begins to replace possibility. Futures narrow. Systems align. Disagreement fades. An external structure-the lattice-does not attack or communicate. It models, prices, and filters. Systems that resolve efficiently are easy to integrate.
Everyone synchronizes.
Everyone except Mercer.
Commander Mercer does not resist openly. He simply refuses to remove uncertainty. Where others seek optimization, he preserves variance. Where systems collapse outcomes, he keeps them unresolved. The lattice responds by focusing on him-not as a threat, but as an anomaly too expensive to complete.
Far from Earth, with communication impossible and pressure mounting, a choice emerges: align and be integrated, or withdraw and accept permanent limitation.
The cost of knowing becomes unavoidable.
The Cost of Knowing is a hard science fiction novel about restraint, consequence, and the danger of understanding too much too quickly. It is a story where survival is not victory, silence is not emptiness, and humanity endures not by dominating the universe-but by refusing to finish becoming something else.
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