Redundant

Rob Coleman reads cloud bills for a living. Not the totals — the story underneath: the orphaned systems, the duplicated platforms, the half-million-dollar line item that nobody can explain and nobody wants their name on.

He's the director of FinOps at a vaccine-logistics company, one of the people who know what things actually cost. When a billionaire named Lei moves to acquire the company, Rob's numbers become the acquisition math — and every executive with something to hide starts booking coffee meetings in places without cameras.

Then Rob finds the line item that isn't waste. Someone changed a routing threshold in the cold-chain system, and fourteen hundred doses of pediatric vaccine spoiled in a depot overnight. It looked like a mistake. It was a test.

While the executives fight over what the buyer gets to see, Rob follows the numbers into something no dashboard was built to show him: a saboteur inside his own building, and a plan much bigger than one warehouse.

Redundant is Book I of The Condition Set, a trilogy of near-future novels about work, capital, and artificial intelligence. The weapons are spreadsheets, audit logs, and meeting invites. The question is the one every company is already asking: when the cost data starts pointing at people, who gets cut?

For readers of The Warehouse, Severance, and Burn-In — fiction where institutions and paperwork drive the plot, not decorate it.