A student's mother sends an email. Her son's essay feedback didn't sound like his teacher.

She's right. It didn't.

Tommy Watts has been teaching *Of Mice and Men* for twenty years. The AI his school installed writes better comments than he does, and he knows it. He bans the machine from his classroom. He uses it every night. When a reporter catches him at the school gate, his honest answer turns him into something he never wanted to be.

In Zurich, Elena Stavros signed the ethics report that was supposed to prevent all of this. Three hundred pages. The company published it for transparency and ignored every recommendation. She stayed anyway. She wrote the compliance language that reclassified a nurse's grief as a "non-linguistic personnel artifact." She's still not sure why she stayed.

A Sheffield steel firm replaced forty-seven workers on a Tuesday. The math was correct. Nobody argued. By Thursday, the firm next door had done the same.

Set in 2027. Most of it is already happening.