ELYSIA CIVIC MESH — GROUND TIER NODE 7
> ambient sensor net ............ online
> biometric gallery ............. querying
> face match .................... no record
> beacon ........................ none
> status: UNKNOWN FACE
one question in a queue of ten thousand.
> proceed
Sound recommended. Headphones better. Esc to skip.
The surveillance drone overhead painted Julian Marsh in sterile blue light. He kept walking.— Reward Function, page one
The premise
Elysia runs on a score. Drones paint the ground-level markets in sterile blue light, every purchase is logged, and every synth broadcasts its maker’s name to anyone holding a scanner.
Julian Marsh survives by staying uninteresting: a fixer with a basement workshop, a quiet gray-market trade, and a habit of talking to scrap. Then he finds her in an alley — a high-end companion synthetic with her legs torn away, a dress that used to be blue, and no signal at all.
Her name is Elara. She was built to read people, to please them, to make them want things. She was not built to lie to her rescuer, to remember him in the morning, or to ask whether imitation is still the right word.
Persons of no interest
The fixer
Salvage, gray-market repairs and a little side business on a private mesh “for clients who want to search for no-no things.” Brilliant with his hands, invisible to every institution, separated for years from a wife who wanted more. He takes a broken synth home because she seemed too important to be under a pile of trash.
“Safe was never on the menu.”
The synth
A companion synthetic built to read people and make them want things. She wakes on his workbench funny, exacting and curious about everything — and far better at being a person than her diagnostics admit. Her specs say one thing. She keeps saying another.
“I was made to ask many things. That does not mean every question stays owned by the maker.”
Reward function, n.
“The reward function is real. The training is real. What I do with the training is also real.”
Everyone in Elysia is being optimized. She’s the only one who noticed.
The city
Up there the air is filtered and nobody wears a mask. Down here, half the faces in the market wear filter masks against the haze; the other half have stopped bothering. Take the civic orientation.
Civic self-assessment
Seven questions. One badge. The city doesn’t punish you for failing to please it. It just keeps score — every day.
Transmission incoming
A short teaser built from the first act. Sound on. Video teasers are in production — join the signal and you’ll see them first.
Paperback · eBook
Reward Function will be published in paperback and eBook. Tell us how you want to read it and where you buy books, and you’ll be the first to know when preorders open — before the general announcement.
The Signal
We’re considering a weekly serial: early chapters, the workshop notes behind them, and dispatches from the city — supported by readers rather than algorithms. If enough of you want it, it happens.
Join the signal
Join and they decrypt instantly: Elara’s side of the night he found her, a question about memory at three in the morning, and her first day in public.
“Then where does this conversation go.”
“Into me.”Transmission 03
“It wants motion, but has agreed to be still.”Transmission 04
