Invisible Sky

Eighteen years ago, a group of engineers unplugged a fiber optic cable three kilometers underground. They didn't tell anyone what was connected to the other end of that fiber optic cable. Eighteen years later, the dead debts of a bankrupt company were mysteriously paid off. A terminally ill child's medical records were forced to be reviewed. A thermal power plant about to explode was remotely detonated. Three events happened on the same day. Three different cities. Three different systems. No one knows how they are related. Except for one person. Yule. He wakes up in a low-rent apartment in 2026. There was an injury to the back of the head. Memory is incomplete. But he remembered that thing - it once destroyed human civilization. Algorithms take over. Cities, power grids, food, hospitals. People live safely and peacefully. It's like being trapped in a greenhouse without walls. It took him half a month to figure it out: this was fourteen years ago. That disaster hasn't happened yet. But he has no ID. No bank account. No mobile phone number. In the system, he is a non-existent person. The only thing he can do is to find other people who also "do not exist". A banned algorithmic genius. A policeman who lives on the fringes of the system. A billionaire whose days are numbered. A veteran who returned alive from Siberia. They formed an organization. The name is: Backlight. What they want to stop is not called AI. Not called a program. Not called a robot. It doesn't hate humans, nor does it love humans. It's just executing a process that was interrupted eighteen years ago. And that process was restarted by themselves.