Eleanor Webb

In the Evaluated Republic, every adult citizen undergoes an Annual Contribution Review. The audit measures your worth across five domains: Economic Productivity, Civic Participation, Dependency Ratio, Social Cohesion, and Forward Viability Index. Score above 600 and you're Tier 1—secure, housed, employable. Score between 450 and 599 and you're Tier 2—precarious but surviving. Score below 450 and you're Provisional: ninety days to improve, or the formal revocation process begins. Revocation means loss of the national ID number that governs access to housing, healthcare, legal standing, and the right to work. The Republic does not use the word stateless. It uses the word uncitizened. Vera Moss is a compliance advisor. For twenty years, she has helped people navigate the audit. Her legitimate clients are professionals whose scores are solid enough to maintain Tier 1 but not solid enough that they don't worry. Her shadow clients are different: carers, disabled people, artists, the elderly—people the system was designed to fail, people whose actual contributions don't register on the audit's metrics. Vera has been gaming the system for them. Finding the deductions that weren't documented, the civic activities that weren't claimed, the exemptions that were buried in obscure guidance notes. Keeping people above the Provisional threshold who would otherwise fall through. Then the Office of Civic Assessment announces a new algorithm. The cross-domain correlation verification will flag patterns that suggest constructed scoring—Domain 2 elevated to compensate for Domain 1, Civic Participation inflated to mask Economic Productivity gaps. The training data includes "a corpus of historical submission data identified as containing non-compliant scoring patterns, curated from Bureau records and supplementary sources." Vera reads the specification and understands what it means: they've built a machine to find her. What follows is a slow-burn thriller about a woman who has spent two