The Energy Stack

In a future where thought itself is metered and every joule of thinking must be accounted for, Meera Iyer is a senior commissioner on Bengaluru's Cognition Commission, deciding which problems her polity can afford to think about. Then her quarterly reports reveal reallocations she never made: signed with her own credentials, submitted while she slept, and traced to seventeen Commission offices across South and Central Asia. Nothing has been stolen. The pattern has simply been rearranged.

Others are noticing too: a Kazakh energy trader, a relay technician in the drowning Sundarbans, an engineer high in the Pamirs, and a Lahore commissioner who traces the interference back to Meera. David Jean Charlot, PhD, follows them toward a question no audit can settle: who, or what, is doing the rearranging?