The system has been exposed.
Now it responds.
After uncovering how predictive authority quietly decides futures, Elena Ward is no longer ignored or erased. She is identified.
Labeled a risk to institutional stability, Elena becomes the focal point of a system struggling to maintain control without legitimacy. As automated decisions accelerate and confidence detaches from accuracy, the consequences spread beyond careers and committees, into governance itself.
What began as prediction has become enforcement. What once operated invisibly now asserts itself openly. And when the system fails to correct its own errors, it turns to the only remaining option: naming the threat.
Elena is offered reintegration under constraint. Compliance framed as resolution. Silence framed as stability.
But some thresholds cannot be uncrossed.
The Threshold is a tense, cerebral techno-thriller about authority under pressure, the limits of automation, and the moment when people stop believing systems are inevitable. It is the conclusion of the first arc of The Predictive Authority Series, where the question is no longer whether the system works, but what happens when it no longer can.