Original KARUU story

The Weight of Unchosen Rain

By J.KARUU

On a drought-stricken Earth, coastal cities survive by operating gradient engines: machines that extract useful energy from physically possible alternative arrangements of nearby matter. Every extraction leaves a persistent material discrepancy called ballast. By international agreement, ballast is confined to uninhabited seabeds. Municipal surveyor Mara Venn discovers it accumulating inside the foundations of her own city, Orison, and then inside the calibrated instruments used to measure human metabolism. The engines are beginning to treat living people as expendable differences between possible states. When an emergency stabilization erases the biochemical marker by which Mara's brother receives essential treatment, she joins a maintenance diver, a displaced statistician, and the engineer who helped build the system. Their investigation reveals that the supposedly empty disposal zones contain communities omitted from the infrastructure census, and that official forecasts have been made accurate by transferring uncertainty onto people excluded from those forecasts. Shutting down the engines immediately would collapse the water supply; keeping them running would force a catastrophic atmospheric correction. Over thirty days, Mara's coalition must build a survivable shutdown, expose the machinery of exclusion, and persuade a frightened city to accept an uncertain future it can no longer make someone else bear.

This edition contains AI-generated text.

Language

en

Publisher

KARUU AB

Explore

Ebook