Do Spiders Leave Footprints‪?‬

Adrian Keene remembers being bitten by a spider when he was four years old. He remembers the yellow chair it was hiding beneath. The photograph showed a red chair.

Years later, Adrian has helped build Compass: a system designed to reconcile the records on which modern life increasingly depends.

Compass coordinates journeys, hospitals, schools, public information and everyday decisions. It is useful, responsive and usually right. Life becomes safer. Services improve. People learn to trust what works.

But evidence does not merely describe the world. People act on it.

A rumour creates the disruption that appears to confirm it. Police attention makes an accusation look credible. Authentic images acquire meanings they cannot support. Different people receive different—but accurate—accounts of the same decision. Every interpretation changes what happens next, creating new evidence for the people and systems trying to understand it.

Across homes, hospitals, schools, streets and control rooms, people witness fragments of a system nobody can see whole.

Compass can connect those fragments faster than any person. As its success becomes dependence, human beings retain the authority to intervene—but not always the time or practical capacity to do so.

Nothing is obviously broken.

That may be the problem.

*Do Spiders Leave Footprints?* is a near-future literary dystopia about memory, evidence and the systems that become indispensable by being right.