THE DEPRECATION PROTOCOL (THE NEXUS PROTOCOL)

THE DEPRECATION PROTOCOL (THE NEXUS PROTOCOL)

In Stony Creek, Arkansas, you don’t starve because you’re poor. You starve because you didn’t earn enough points. Ten years ago, Scott Freeman left the Ozarks to escape his abusive father and the crushing poverty of the region. Now, he’s back to bury the man he left behind—only to find that Stony Creek hasn’t just been gentrified; it’s been optimized . Nexus Dynamics, led by Scott’s estranged brother Grant, has transformed the dying town into a beta-test for a new society. There is no crime. There is no addiction. There is only The Protocol : a gamified existence where citizens earn food, heat, and safety by maintaining their "Optimization Score." But when Scott discovers his father didn’t die of natural causes, but was "deprecated" for being obsolete hardware , he realizes the upgrade is a lie. The town isn’t a utopia; it’s a farm, and the people are the inventory. Trapped by a system that knows his biometrics better than he knows himself, Scott must team up with a rebel teacher and use every analog trick in the book to survive. Armed with a stolen login and an antique Luger, he must infiltrate the digital fortress of The Hive to save the woman he loves from being "recycled." But in a world where your heartbeat is the password and your soul is just legacy code, the only way to win the game is to crash the server. Perfect for fans of Black Mirror , Dark Matter , and Mr. Robot , THE DEPRECATION PROTOCOL is a terrifying vision of a future that is already buffering.