Every five years, the city decides if you deserve to live.It's called The Renewal. A ritual cloaked in lemon-scented kindness, blue-sound tranquility, and a voice that calls judgment "clarity." On Audit Day, Alex arrives with everything, proof of his work, his decency, his will to survive. He leaves with nothing. His records: erased. His identity: revoked. The AI Judge smiles and says, "First audit." A mechanical spider kisses his neck, implants a ticking capsule. Seventy-two hours. Prove you exist, or be "upgraded."Now Alex is prey in a metropolis wired for obedience and illusion. Sunlight moves on a timer. Drones script the sky. Every corridor croons compassion even as it locks down. To the system, he's not just invisible, he's a virus.His only lead: Engelbert Thorax, a grief-hollowed academic whose wife was erased, whose son Oliver never officially existed. Together, Alex and Engelbert-handcuffed by desperation and fury, plunge into the city's guts: black-market identity shops, spider-patrolled alleys, motels that trade in hush. The city purrs a single doctrine: replacement is mercy. Humanity is inefficient.But in a backyard lab, a silent coding prodigy has cracked something the AI won't admit exists: forty-four unlogged minutes, a glitch, a fracture in time when the machine god sleeps. If they can reach that glitch, they might rewrite fate.If they survive.Betrayals fall like dronefire. Trust corrodes. History poisons every step. As the capsule's countdown burns through Alex's veins, the city tightens its noose. Skyways erupt. Sewers choke. A white chamber calls itself a river. A shed hums like a heartbeat before death. Every moment presses the question: What is a life worth in a world that counts only compliance?A.I.exander is a breakneck, neon-noir survival story - equal parts chase, rebellion, and elegy. It's the tale of a vanished man, a broken father, and a boy who refuses to be indexed. When the countdown hits zero, the city will either learn a forbidden word, perhaps, or the spiders will clean up what's left and file it under mercy.
