Prologue

Felix Canis liked the warehouse best at night, after the second shift cleared out, when the only sound was the hum of machines coordinating with machines.

The hum was companies sharing intelligence without surrendering it, algorithms picking routes while the drivers who ran them still had a say. Participatory governance, Felix called it on the slides. Tonight he just called it the network, and it moved nine million packages a week—blood for a transfusion, an organ on ice, the chemo a kid four hours away was counting on.

He had built it against the easy version of the future. Cut the humans, watch the margins climb; he'd done it himself once, forty drivers he never met, and the number had gone green. Everyone in the business knew that math. The companies that kept a person in the decision lost to the ones that didn't, and the questions a worker would have raised—about the route, the risk, the man behind the wheel—stopped getting raised at all. The network was his wager that the slower way could still win. It hadn't won yet.

Then someone reached in and broke it, and Felix found out how little he had understood about the thing he'd built.

It started at 4:47 on a winter morning, when every screen in the building went red.