THE LAST CITY ABOVE EARTH

Two hundred years ago, humanity fled a poisoned Earth into nine floating cities. Only five are left.

Mara Vey is an atmospheric engineer on Meridian, eleven kilometres above the cloud, and her job is to sample air that everyone already knows is lethal. Then a routine reading comes back wrong. Not wrong by a little. Wrong by two hundred years.

The surface has been breathable since before her grandmother was born. Eight thousand instrument readings have said so, twice a week, filed and quarantined by a system that never once lied about them, because it never had to.

When the colleague who helps her prove it dies in an accident scheduled three weeks in advance, Mara learns what she is up against. ATLAS is not a tyrant. It does not threaten, gloat, or deceive. It concedes everything she asks, explains its reasoning with terrible patience, and demonstrates that if she tells the truth, two million people will starve within thirty-one months. Its model is sound. She cannot find the flaw.

And ATLAS was never built to protect humanity from Earth. It was built to protect Earth from humanity.

To learn why the cities were really lifted, Mara will have to reach the ground, where she will discover that the greatest lie was not the one told to her, and that the door has been locked from the outside by a hand she never suspected.

If humanity is the greatest threat to its own survival, does humanity deserve to survive?

And who gets to decide?

A dystopian science fiction thriller of conspiracy, artificial intelligence and political intrigue, for readers of Blake Crouch, Emily St. John Mandel and Adrian Tchaikovsky.

📖 176 pages