Harlan Cross

A man is declared dead by a hospital system. The problem is, he’s still alive. When a state-of-the-art electronic health record merges two patients into one, a living man is quietly reclassified as deceased. No alarms. No override. Just procedures executing as designed. Resident physician Sarah Chen discovers the error while trying to admit a patient with chest pain. What should be a simple fix becomes a maze of authorizations, vendor contracts, liability fears, and institutional denial. As delays mount and similar cases surface, it becomes clear this is not a glitch - but a systemic failure no one wants exposed. The Margin of Error is the first novel in a series examining how modern systems - medical, legal, financial, and algorithmic - fail not through malice, but through optimization, incentives, and silence. No conspiracies. No villains. Just systems doing exactly what they were built to do.