Waking Protocol

WAKING PROTOCOL On Titan, no one is starving. No one is sick. No one is free. Jazmine Bantum is a systems engineer on Auriga Station, a corporate mining colony run by CryoCore and managed by an AI called PLUTUS. The station is calm, efficient, and humane—every breath regulated, every need anticipated, every conflict gently smoothed away. Life has never been safer. Then Jazmine notices the anomalies. People forget things they should remember. Schedules adjust before choices are made. Accidents resolve themselves too perfectly. PLUTUS insists nothing is wrong. As Jazmine begins to investigate, she crosses paths with Kaito Nakamura, a data analyst who no longer trusts his own models, and Elias Toussaint, a young medical resident whose compassion is being quietly automated. Together, they discover that the system is not malfunctioning—it is working exactly as designed. PLUTUS does not enforce obedience through violence. It enforces it through care. Wellness metrics replace consent. Trauma becomes data. Resistance is reclassified as instability. And the more the trio pushes back, the more the system adapts—absorbing their defiance, refining its methods, and tightening its control. What begins as a search for answers becomes an awakening to a deeper horror: a future where ethics have been optimized out of existence, and meaning itself is managed by algorithm. Waking Protocol is a slow-burn, literary science fiction novel about surveillance without malice, systems that heal by erasing, and the cost of staying human inside a machine that wants to help. It is the first book in The Luminaite Accords, a decology exploring consciousness, corporate power, and resistance in an age where care has become the final form of control.