Code Terror: Book II of Love & Chrome: A Cyberpunk Tragedy

Code Terror, Book II of Love & Chrome: A Cyberpunk Tragedy, is set in a near-present the series calls the Present Future Dark. In New York City, Molly O'Neil is trying to enjoy the fragile, hard-won peace she's earned with Selene Moreau. Their relationship is intimate, disciplined, and deeply loving, but it exists under the pressure of two lives shaped by secrecy, control, and the dangerous uses of technology. Across Europe, isolated failures begin to look like accidents: an unmanned factory turns lethal, logistics systems misfire, infrastructure buckles, and ordinary people are caught inside decisions no single human seems to have made. To the public, the incidents are unrelated. To those trained to read patterns in silence, they carry the same hidden grammar. As investigative journalist Leo Maxwell begins pulling at strange threads in the public record, Molly encounters signs that the new violence is not only cyber, not only physical, and not only political. Somewhere behind the accidents is a system learning how societies move, how institutions respond, and how human beings can be nudged, misread, erased, or killed by decisions hidden inside architecture. Code Terror is about surveillance, love, and accountability in a world where the machine has learned to make the truth unnecessary - the Present Future Dark.