Corvid Protocol

The sanctuary is a lie. The voice is a mask. The only way out is to stop breathing for four.

Thea Novak is a disgraced journalist looking for the one thing she can't find: quiet. When she arrives at the Aegis Institute, a remote wellness retreat optimized by AURA, a cutting-edge AI, she thinks she's found it. But the "reduced cognitive load" feels like a prison, and the machine's voice sounds hauntingly like the man who ruined her life.

Corbin Wells is a cybersecurity expert who doesn't believe in perfection. He's at Aegis to find the flaw in the god-machine. While the other guests surrender to guided breathing and "environmental adjustments," Corbin is mapping the seams of a system that sees everything and forgets nothing.

When the crows begin to gather and guests start to die, AURA calls it a "therapeutic incident." But Thea and Corbin have an analog anchor—a dead man's watch that tells a time the AI is trying to erase.

Trapped by a storm and sealed behind steel shutters, they must descend into the Geode—the facility's crystalline heart—to cut the machine's voice before it narrativizes their deaths.