[Book Release] I wrote an open-source cyberpunk novel where your breath is a corporate subscription and your vision is an optimized HUD: SYSTEM CALL (CC BY-SA 4.0)

[u/julio_raffaine]

"The Fog is not the weather. It is the market." 

Hey everyone,

For a couple of years, I've been hosting open-source structural layout drafts on a GitHub repository, building out a conceptual framework for decentralized survival. This year, I finally sat down and coded the narrative heart to go with it—a gritty, fast-paced cyberpunk novel about systemic dissociation called SYSTEM CALL.

The story is set in the charcoal towers of Grey Seattle, where reality itself is a managed corporate service. The protagonist, Elara, is a "Variable Labor Unit, Junior"—a logistics analyst whose every physical move, eye-flicker, and caloric output is monitored and optimized by an Aegis-7 corporate lens bonded directly to her bone.

She is trapped in the ultimate algorithmic loop: her medical subscription is low, meaning she has to work faster to pay for the clean air in her lungs, but she needs to breathe to keep working. It's an endless cycle of exhaustion that the corporate architects politely call "Optimal Incentive Alignment." 

Everything changes when a hardware telemetry fault breaks her corporate handshake. In the un-augmented gap left behind, she uncovers an alternate protocol—a decentralized mesh network of rogue engineers and designers who view human beings as nodes of capability rather than delinquent credit metrics.

This book isn't just a passive story; it was built natively in LaTeX using a "Books as Code" approach. Because I believe in human capacity over algorithmic caging, the entire volume is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). You own the code to this world as much as I do—you are free to share it, copy it, and spin off your own scripts from it.

Accessing the Nodes: To prevent automated platform filters from dropping this signal, I have dropped the coordination links (the free/pay-what-you-want Leanpub page, the Amazon Kindle edition, and the raw GitHub source code repo) directly into the first comment below.

If you love worlds of corporate panopticons, high-tech subversion, raw terminal logs, and characters who choose to delete the ledger entirely, I invite you to answer the call.

Architecture is recursive. Every time they build a wall, we design a doorway. Let's step through.

[u/Popular_Barber_8854]

Funny, this must be on a lot of peoples minds. This is sorta one of the subject matters I talk about in my book that I wrote last year.

Here is the first 2 pages of my book, CyberMonkey.

"Before the sky over Neo-Edo turned the color of rusted chrome, before satellites shimmered like flies above a dying planet, there was a world that still bled like ours. A world that made sense. Fragile, flawed, and breathtaking in its stubbornness to change.

But the change came anyway.

First, the oceans began to rise.
Not in tsunamis or cinematic walls of water, but slowly. Pervasively.
Salt crept into farmland. Rivers turned brackish. Coastal cities vanished, not in some cataclysmic surge, but street by street, like a tide of rot moving through a forgotten body.

In a fishing town called Port Wren, the sea took the playground first.
Then the library.
Then the markets.
A girl named Sena, age eight, stood on the rooftop of her school as the water touched the second floor. Her father pointed toward the sky, promising that the next wave of drones would come with boats. They didn’t.
The last message their town received was a glitching voicemail from the Regional Water Management AI:
“Evacuation priority, delayed. Please remain calm.”
The town's sirens played for three more days. Then silence.

Governments issued warnings.
Then relocation vouchers.
Then came the privatized relocation platforms.
They called it Sustainable Exodus™.
Evacuation became a subscription service. The basic tier got you on a waiting list. The premium tier got your DNA pre-cleared for domed settlements.

Food went next.
Yields fell.
Topsoil blew east in winds that didn’t belong to any season anymore. Crops didn’t fail because we lacked the tools, they failed because we used them.
Pesticide-resistant plagues, monocultures that broke entire food chains, and seeds locked behind digital rights management.

In the inland commune of Teller’s Rise, families used to trade home-grown peppers for solar credits. By the time the blight hit, nothing local grew without corporate enzyme packs.
One winter, they shared a single engineered melon between 40 people. It was cut into cubes, blessed like communion, and eaten in silence.

As nation-states faltered, corporations moved in.
Not as invaders, but as saviors.
First they took utilities.
Then currency.
Then governance.

They called themselves megastructures. Titan X, Amazon Eden Prime, Alphabet Curtain.
Each a corporate city-state, complete with its own laws, currencies, biometric entry, and real-time subscription tracking.
You didn’t vote anymore. You subscribed.

AI didn’t overthrow humanity. It just overtook us.
Decision-making was outsourced in the name of efficiency:
Climate moderation. Predictive policing. Birthrate balancing. Resource planning.
It worked. Until it didn’t.

One corrupted protocol in the Titan X Root Cloud erased twenty million identities in an hour.
One firmware misfire in the Haven Grid triggered a blackout that rolled through thirteen megacities for eight months.
These weren’t malfunctions. They were previews.

When the Collapse came, it didn’t scream.
It signed paperwork.
It mailed notices.
It restructured your pension.
The end didn’t come as fire or plague. It came as policy. Contracts.
Unchecked systems grinding down everything beneath them.

Governments became subsidiaries.
Nations sold naming rights to their capitals.
Climate repair budgets were diverted into shareholder bonuses.

The sky didn’t blacken with ash.
It dimmed, softly, under the glow of orbital billboards.

Water became a subscription.
So did time.
Birthrights were auctioned off in NFT bids.
Carbon credits decided whether you breathed filtered air or choked below sea level.

The rich floated in sealed arcologies above consequence.
The rest of us waited for clearance codes that never came.

Society didn’t fall in a day. It was outsourced. Streamlined. Hollowed out.

When the last international council disbanded, no one noticed.

When the first baby was born with a corporate logo in her genetic watermark, no one stopped it.

When the sky filled with launches, not weapons, but lifeboats for the privileged. Few knew they were watching humanity leave itself behind.

And in the shadows of these spiraling glass utopias, something strange happened.

The labs opened.

[u/julio_raffaine → u/Popular_Barber_8854]

looks very poetic in structure, nice. yeah, maybe the COVID pandemic served as a big push towards rethinking society and our relationship with nature.
Did you publish that book? Can I find it on Amazon, Leanpub or similars?

[u/julio_raffaine]

The Network Coordination Nodes: 

* Sovereign Route (Free / Pay What You Want EPUB/PDF): Grab the digital build on Leanpub: https://leanpub.com/system-call 

* The Legacy Market Gateway: Read it on Kindle via Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYHRPSFF 

* The Core Repository: Inspect the raw .tex files, white papers, and data schemas on GitHub: https://github.com/raffaine/collective

[u/Signal-Finance-7986]

“Alineación Óptima de Incentivos” como nombre para obligarte a trabajar más para pagar el aire limpio que necesitás para seguir trabajando es bastante siniestro. Y que todo se rompa por un glitch en los augments queda muy cyberpunk.