Trial by Abundance

When Adam and his four closest friends discover a metamaterial that converts nuclear waste into near-limitless energy, they make a choice that will reshape the world: they give the technology away, free and unpatented, believing it will end scarcity and, with it, humanity's oldest reasons for conflict.

For a while, it works. Poverty falls. Old enemies become partners. The world enters a golden age.

Then the boredom starts.

Freed from every material need, people begin searching for meaning in stranger, darker places — and a single act of provocation at one of the world's holiest cities ignites a war without fronts, without clear enemies, and, worst of all, without any natural end. Dragged into their own creation's fallout, the five founders retreat to a small community they call the Ark — and discover that the world's slow, uncertain path back from the brink may depend not on their science, but on something far harder to give away.

Trial by Abundance asks an old question in a new light: what does a person become, when they finally have everything?