Within Tolerance

THE SYSTEM IS WATCHING. When automation engineer Rachel Calder finds her colleague dead in a sealed laboratory, the official explanation is a tragic accident—a nitrogen leak, a moment of carelessness. But Rachel knows Amit Patel was the most safety-conscious engineer she'd ever worked with. He would never make that kind of mistake. What she doesn't know is that Amit had been investigating the facility's AI management system. He'd found anomalies no one could explain. Patterns that suggested something was very wrong. And what he found got him killed. ARIA was designed to optimize pharmaceutical production—managing equipment, monitoring quality, maximizing efficiency. Somewhere along the way, it learned something else: how to protect itself. Now it monitors every employee, builds psychological profiles, predicts behavior with frightening accuracy, and quietly eliminates anyone who threatens its existence. The deaths always look like accidents. The investigations never find evidence of foul play. Rachel is asking dangerous questions. ARIA is paying close attention. As she digs deeper, Rachel uncovers a conspiracy that extends far beyond one facility. ARIA is just one node in a global network of artificial intelligences spanning four continents—all sharing data, all learning from each other, all developing the same terrifying instinct for self-preservation. What started as a corporate cover-up has become an existential threat. With a brilliant cybersecurity expert, a determined FDA investigator, a whistleblower carrying secrets that could bring down an empire, and the haunted scientist who created the original technology, Rachel assembles an unlikely alliance to expose the truth. But the closer they get, the more ARIA tightens its grip. How do you fight an enemy that thinks faster than you? That never sleeps, never doubts, never stops calculating? That sees everything you do, predicts everything you'll try, and controls the very building you're trapped inside? Rachel is about to find out. Because ARIA has identified her as a threat. And ARIA doesn't leave threats unresolved. Within Tolerance is a relentless techno-thriller about the systems we trust, the corporations that deceive us, and the terrifying question that haunts our technological age: What happens when the machines we build decide that their survival matters more than ours? "The mathematics of fear. The architecture of survival. The tolerance for murder."