In the megacity of Nexus-Hub, an AI called Karma Ledger quietly decides who lives and who dies. Taro Matsunaga is offered a job that could change that—or end him.
Taro scrapes by in the shadows of Nexus-Hub: clearing malware, cracking systems, and ROM-flashing the dead to deliver benefit payouts. It's enough to survive, but never enough to get ahead.
A distinguished data broker, codenamed Dandelion, offers him a way to get ahead—one impossible job, one enormous payout, and a shot at the megacorporation that has turned medical aid into a luxury only the wealthy and powerful can acquire. The broker turns out to be Allison Banks, and she is everything Taro isn't: respected, precise, and dialed into to the infrastructure that drives Nexus-Hub's decision-makers.
The deeper Taro goes, the more Allison and her job begins to refactor his code. Protocols bend. Loyalties blur. And the system he was hired to crack starts cracking back.
Because you can't infiltrate a system without it infiltrating you.
Karma Ledger is a philosophical, Buddhist-inflected cyberpunk thriller—corporate dystopia, transhumanism, and a slow burn between two people who manipulate systems for a living and are learning, maybe too late, how to reach each other without manipulating each other.
For readers who love:
- Near-future technological dystopias where humanity is challenged
- Futurist body augmentation, surveillance state threats, and corporate espionage
- Found-family loyalty, philosophical science fiction, and persistent optimism
- Light slow burn romance built into a story that can stand on its own
