Austin, Texas. October 2030. A city of 2.4 million people and 43 million connected devices. NexGrid, a private technology company, operates Austin's urban intelligence platform - 12,000 sensor nodes, 4,200 autonomous vehicles repurposed as mobile camera arrays, and a WiFi mesh that identifies human beings by the way their bodies interrupt radio waves. The system scores citizens using behavioral confidence models, shares data with ICE, the FBI, and the DEA, and stores the most sensitive data on the moon - beyond the jurisdiction of any court on Earth. Twelve characters. One city. A system that sees everything and understands nothing. A dead man scored at 87.4%. A journalist with a secret. An engineer on a visa. A mother whose marriage ended in a credit card statement. A girl who knocked on a door. A boy who stopped drawing. The surveillance state wasn't built by villains. It was built by convenience. One click at a time. Every technology in this book exists or is in active development.