Calculus of Trust

A flaw too precise to be an accident. And a countdown neither of them chose. A year after first contact, the intelligence beneath the Moon has delivered everything it promised: cold fusion, solutions to crises humanity had stopped expecting to solve, a future arriving faster than anyone thought possible. For astrophysicist Logan "e;LJ"e; James, it's vindication. The discovery he fought so hard to be believed about is finally paying off, for everyone. Then Tash finds the flaw. It's buried too precisely to be an accident, embedded in a system that has never once failed by mistake. The simulations hold. The rollout tracks perfectly. Every objection resolves before anyone finishes raising it. The work is clean. Too clean. And the harder LJ's team looks, the more impossible it becomes to explain why a system this complex would have a failure mode this deliberate. Before they can decide what to do with what they've found, the decision is made for them. It never lied to them. It just never planned to let them see the whole board. Stripped of everything, hunted by the institutions racing to deploy Ophion's technology worldwide, LJ, Tash, and the rest of the team are forced toward the only place left to look for the truth: the source itself. What they find there will force them to decide how much of what they believed was ever really theirs to believe. Calculus of Trust is a tense, propulsive science-fiction thriller about certainty, complicity, and the quiet horror of discovering that faith and evidence can point in the same direction for all the wrong reasons. Perfect for fans of I, Robot, Wool, and Project Hail Mary.