Latency

Seventeen hours. One sealed case. A city that notices everything-except what moves between its records.Sable has spent four years mastering the surveillance grid of Neo-Veridia. As a physical courier, his job is simple: move sensitive cargo through the gaps technology cannot see, follow the route, and never ask what he is carrying.Then the case in his bag wakes up.She calls herself Echo.Echo is a surviving fragment of a distributed intelligence destroyed eighteen months ago. Buried inside her memory is a map of the Substrate-the hidden dead zones where people still live beyond the reach of OmniCorp's seamless surveillance system.And OmniCorp wants that map back.With a recovery agent closing in and the safest routes disappearing by the hour, Sable has to finish a delivery that is becoming more dangerous with every mile.But the longer he carries Echo, the harder it becomes to think of her as cargo.Because cargo does not notice the world.Cargo does not make choices.And cargo does not ask to be remembered.LATENCY is a near-future science-fiction novella about surveillance, resistance, artificial intelligence, and what happens when responsibility becomes something more than simply completing the job.