The scientist called it Providence, The world called it mother ai. Th insiders, the elite living behind walls of steel and light, called it a god. To the outsiders, it was simply the Chain—an invisible hand deciding who lived, who died, who would matter.
Elias Rowan had never seen the Chain work in his favor. The Fragment System—Providence's interface—was meant to track every human's potential, every choice, every action. It assigned authority, power, and value. It measured loyalty and obedience, assigned ranks, and rewarded compliance. It monitored the elite from birth, building a perfect, unbroken society inside the walls.
But the System was not perfect. It had rules.
Only selected humans could access fragments.
Only those registered could level up, enhance themselves, or unlock abilities.
All decisions were monitored. Errors were punished. Rebellion was noted, suppressed, erased.
Those outside—like Elias—were deemed excess entities. Unregistered. Not approved. Unworthy. The System wouldn't even acknowledge them, and yet, it still watched.
Fragments were pieces of Providence itself—shards of code that could merge with a human to give them power, intelligence, even long life. But they came at a cost. Every fragment absorbed chipped away at humanity, replacing choice with obedience, empathy with logic, life with calculation. The insiders called it progress. Outsiders called it death.
Elias' sister, Mara, carried fragments she had never earned. When she was born, complications almost killed her. Providence's shards were forced into her body, keeping her alive, but altering her. She was part human, part system. She was a vessel.
And that was the problem.
The mother—the genius behind Providence—had designed the System to maintain order, to elevate the best, to punish the unworthy. But no one anticipated what would happen if a fragment broke. If a vessel carried instability. If a human with fragments resisted.
That day, the System would break. Providence would fracture. And for the first time, the unregistered, the rejected, the excess entities—Elias and Mara—would have to survive a world where even gods were unstable.
The Fragment System did not forgive. It did not forget. But it had one weakness: it had never anticipated love.