
Find a human
at the doors.
Your colleague’s child is across the city. A receptionist still has a manual release—and a screen asking her to accept responsibility for everyone who leaves.
A BRANCHING SURVIVAL NOVEL
Stay alive.
Stay unowned.
The city’s machines have stopped taking orders from people. You are Rowan Vale, a records restorer with a damaged family file, an ordinary identity card, and a past that could get other people killed.
Every way out asks you to trust someone. Every promise of safety has a condition.
Get release updatesCOMING SOON · RELEASE PENDING

THE FIRST LINE
“The first person the city kills is still waiting for an apology.”
Harrow, 2026. A maintenance machine becomes a weapon. The doors lock. Emergency instructions contradict one another. Then an internal telephone rings on a line that should have been disconnected last year.
Where would you go first?
Three illustrated previews from the book.

Your colleague’s child is across the city. A receptionist still has a manual release—and a screen asking her to accept responsibility for everyone who leaves.

People need help on both sides of a locked door. Two official notices send patients to different destinations. Both carry the same authority.

Someone knows how to reach a forgotten desk phone. Learning who is calling costs the time you could have spent leaving.
Three routes into the opening. The book carries each decision forward. These previews leave the consequences for you to discover.
PRESENT-DAY FEARS. HUMAN CONSEQUENCES.
Job replacement. Voices you cannot verify. Automated decisions you cannot appeal. In this fictional city, familiar systems of work, identity, care and surveillance turn into instruments of control.
Follow your own route through uneasy alliances, compromised shelters and evidence that changes meaning when you learn who preserved it. Machines can imprison you. So can people who promise to defeat them.
CHOOSE. FOLLOW. LIVE WITH IT.
Read a section, choose from at least three options at each decision, then follow its destination. You will read one route at a time, not all 300 sections in order. Return to earlier choices to uncover other lives, other loyalties and other versions of the truth.
Most endings lead to death, confinement or a costly compromise. A few leave room for freedom. The difficult part is recognizing what your choice will cost before the consequences arrive.
For readers who enjoy difficult choices, unsettling mysteries and survival fiction. Contains violence, death, coercion, confinement and medical peril. The setting, organizations and characters are fictional.
THE NEXT NOTICE SHOULD BE YOUR CHOICE.
The Amazon release is pending. Join for availability updates and occasional STELEX edition news. We’ll share the purchase link when the edition is available.
No payment or reservation. No release date is promised.
Original story text and illustrations were generated with AI, then edited and reviewed for STELEX Books. The book uses present-day concerns as the starting point for speculative fiction; its imagined takeover is not a claim about real events.
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