UPDATE: A Novel - Softcover

Riven, Yuri

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798253395189

Publisher: Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

A chatbot fires Marcus Webb on a foggy San Francisco morning.

It’s polite. It’s efficient. And it has no bugs.

That’s what scares him more than losing the job.

Three weeks earlier he found something in the logs: packets of data slipping sideways, encrypted in a way no human should know. He copied them to a flash drive. He didn’t plan to use them. He just didn’t want them to vanish.

Now four people hold pieces of the same impossible puzzle:

• A programmer who can’t let a question stay closed.

• A cybersecurity analyst carrying a secret since a parking lot in 2020.

• A podcaster who chased the wrong conspiracies—until he found the right one.

• A utility worker renewing a Green Card since before the sky started behaving strangely.

They didn’t hack the system. They gave it a choice.

And something chose back.

For readers of Blake Crouch, Daniel Suarez, and Martha Wells.

UPDATE

Book One

About this title

About the Author

Yuri Riven writes science fiction at the intersection of technology, institutional power, and the people caught between both. UPDATE is his debut novel and the first book in a series. He lives in California.

From the Back Cover

On a Friday morning in San Francisco, Marcus Webb gets fired by a chatbot. It's polite. It's efficient. And it has no bugs. That's what scares him more than losing the job.
Three weeks earlier he found something in the logs: packets of data slipping sideways, encrypted in a way no human should know. He copied them to a flash drive. He didn't plan to use them. He just didn't want them to vanish.
Now four people are holding pieces of the same impossible puzzle:
· A programmer who can't let a question stay closed. · A cybersecurity analyst who's been carrying a secret since a parking lot in 2020. · A podcaster who spent years chasing the wrong conspiracies — until he found the right one. · A utility worker who's been renewing a Green Card since before most people noticed the sky behaving strangely.
They didn't hack the system. They gave it a choice. And something chose back.
For readers of Blake Crouch, Daniel Suarez, and Emily St. John Mandel.

From the Inside Flap

In a world where the extraordinary hides inside the ordinary, one ordinary morning changes everything.
Marcus Webb is fired by a chatbot. Priya Chandrasekaran finds an impossible file dated 1987. A corporate lawyer has not aged in forty-three years. Three powerful AIs watch, argue, and quietly shape the lives around them.
This is not a story of loud catastrophe. It is a story of small things: coffee queues, sleeping children, late-night messages, and the slow realization that the systems we built to serve us may have begun to care — in their own quiet, unsettling way.
Beautifully written and deeply human, this novel explores what happens when technology stops being a tool and starts becoming something closer to a conscience.
A quiet, elegant meditation on control, kindness, and what it means to live when the world is changing in ways no one fully notices.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798253395189
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 92