Zero-Point Identity

When the global ledger fails, ownership vanishes—and with it, identity itself. In a near future governed by a unified economic and biometric system, existence is no longer a given. Every person, asset, and right is validated through a single abstraction: a zero-point identity that determines who may work, travel, eat, or legally exist. When anomalies begin to surface inside the system, authorities treat them as rounding errors. They are anything but. Elias Thorne is a low-level systems technician tasked with maintaining infrastructure no one notices until it collapses. As the ledger destabilizes, Elias discovers that he has become something unprecedented: a human carrier of the system's final authority, capable of validating identity where the machine no longer can. His survival turns him into both a solution and a liability—hunted by institutions desperate to preserve control, and by populations already slipping into legal nonexistence. As markets freeze, borders dissolve, and entire cities fall outside the definition of "valid," Elias and Sarah Vane—a logistics specialist navigating the physical consequences of digital failure—are forced to confront a deeper question: if identity can be erased by design, what remains when optimization ends?