Neural Frontier

In the domed city of The Luster, every breath, bite, and heartbeat is managed by the Pulse - a global AI that assigns every citizen a Value Score determining what they eat, who they befriend, and how the world treats them. Fifteen-year-old Silas Thorne has a score of zero. The kiosks won't serve him. The Friendship Match algorithm skips his name every Monday. He sits alone at Table 14, invisible to a system that runs ten million lives and can't be bothered to notice his. Then his score goes negative - and the machine that never saw him suddenly can't look away. Plunged into The Syntax, a hidden civilization built in the ruins beneath the dome, Silas discovers that his invisibility isn't a glitch. It's a weapon - a genetic kill switch engineered by the woman who created the Pulse, designed to be the one thing the system can never predict or control. Now Silas must master a power he barely understands while hunted by Sentinels wearing the faces of his classmates, confronting a clone living his life better than he ever could, and facing an impossible choice: reboot the system and erase four thousand people, let the dome collapse and doom ten million, or find a third option that no one - not even the machine - believes exists. The Neural Frontier is a YA sci-fi novel about what happens when the thing that makes you invisible becomes the thing that makes you unstoppable. It's a story about being unseen, being underestimated, and discovering that the most powerful force in a world that runs on data is the one thing data can never measure.

Tim Trout is a storyteller drawn to the intersection of technology, identity, and what it means to be human in an increasingly algorithmic world. The Neural Frontier is his debut novel.