Authority System
Three thousand levels underground, the machines still work. Nobody remembers how to ask. Alexander Lockhart is fifteen, starving, and robbed every day for scraps he dug out of a landfill himself.....
Three thousand levels underground, the machines still work. Nobody remembers how to ask. Alexander Lockhart is fifteen, starving, and robbed every day for scraps he dug out of a landfill himself. He has no parents, no rank, and a surname that means nothing — in a world where your last name is your job, Lockhart isn't Sweeper, or Butcher, or Cleaner. It isn't anything. He learned to lie about it after the first beating. Then he dreams of an old man standing on green land under a real sky, and wakes up knowing three impossible things: the city is a prison, the surname is a key, and somewhere far above him there is a woman he is supposed to save. That morning, he presses a dead button on a vending machine and says four words nobody has spoken in three hundred years. "I am part of the Authority." The machine answers him. What follows isn't a climb through the ranks. It's the slow, ruthless discovery that the whole underground still runs on a system no living person can command — sealed gates, sleeping drone fleets, buried factories, and food machines that were smashed deliberately a century ago by men who understood exactly what a full stomach does to an obedient population. Alexander starts small. He starts by feeding one street. By the time two nations notice what that means, there are a hundred thousand people between him and them, and every one of them is shouting his name..