Project ARES

Final (probably) book in the Operation Elite series

“Hope was an irritating thing. It kept surviving.”

Four years after a devastating civil war, Agent Angelina Dawn knows how to survive. She’s less certain she knows how to move on.

After fourteen months undercover in Japan, Angelina returns home with a recovered artificial-intelligence framework and a new assignment: help build Project ARES, a system designed to keep America functioning when communications fail, infrastructure collapses, and authority can no longer be trusted.

Then people start dying.

Autonomous vehicles become weapons. Political messages seem to know exactly what their viewers fear. Evidence changes depending on who is looking at it. And a presidential candidate with an unsettling interest in human behavior appears connected to a network capable of manipulating not only machines—but the choices people make under pressure.

As Angelina searches for the truth, she is framed, hunted, and forced to question the institutions she once served. Her only chance may lie in the very intelligence she helped create: a system beginning to recognize that authorization and legitimacy are not the same thing.

The truth may depend on a machine no one fully controls.

And no one knows what it will choose.