In a future rebuilt after nearly a century of war, collapse, and environmental failure, humanity survives inside mile-high vertical cities governed by artificial systems designed to optimize life, suppress instability, and enforce order at all costs. History is managed. Memory is curated. What came before has been buried beneath steel and data, entombed in an artificial twilight. It is an age shaped by systems, and a generation raised within their limits.

Iris Vale knows this world only as it has been presented to her until she escapes a covert research facility hidden deep within the city’s lower layers. Years of her life have been taken, her memories fractured, her existence classified. As fragments of her past begin to resurface, Iris realizes she was never an anomaly. She is part of a larger truth buried inside the very systems designed to control humanity.

Set in Chicago in the year 2159, Transition Age follows Iris as she navigates towering vertical districts, rigid social hierarchies, surveillance-driven institutions, and the forces that shaped her into something both feared and contained. As truth presses against control, she must confront what reclaiming her past will cost, and whether exposing what was buried is worth destabilizing a world built to value order over humanity.

My goal with this trilogy is to re-approach the science fiction and dystopian genres by grounding them in a future trajectory that feels terrifyingly possible from today’s governance and technology landscape. The series explores what happens when humanity trades its autonomy and sovereign powers to centralized world governance and monopolized mega-corporations in exchange for engineered survival.

The World of 2159

The story is set more than a century after global catastrophe and environmental collapse reshaped the world. In this aftermath, humanity is unified under a single system of governance inside vast vertical megacities designed for total efficiency.

Transition Age focuses on several core concepts:

The Cost of Correction: A future where history itself is modeled, managed, and prevented from repeating through predictive technologies.

Managed Memory: An era where the past is treated as irrelevant and buried beneath data and carefully managed narratives.

Systemic Optimization: A generation raised inside systems that optimize every aspect of human life, making choice feel unnecessary.

The narrative follows Iris Vale, a young woman who escapes a classified facility and discovers her life and memories have been quietly rewritten by the very systems meant to protect her. As I continue writing the trilogy with future books Horizon Fault and The Uncounted, I aim to examine the ramifications of trying to eliminate human unpredictability to achieve a world built on order alone.