In the year the oceans finally breached the Echelon Bridge and the last copper mines were carved into dust, the city-state of Metropolis Q rose out of composite glass and cooling towers, a living circuit stitched to a starving Earth. Its governors promised order through the Palimpsest Protocol, a revolutionary—and incendiary—way to conserve not just power, but people: two citizens legally, neurologically, and temporally entwined to share one body and one civic record, alternating in circadian shifts mediated by quantum locks and a crown of shimmering neuroglass. How far would you go to never be alone inside your head?
Kira Ivanova, a flood refugee turned code cartographer, has mapped the city's ghost infrastructure for years: abandoned tram tunnels beneath Sable Market, argon-lit server arcades under the Meridian Court, the refrigerated artery known as the Helix where the qubit cores hum like a sleeping throat. When her residency is revoked—another rationing sweep logged by the Oracle Grid—her only option is to coalesce with Qiao Ren, a decorated transit engineer dying of a rare myelin failure whose memories are already slipping out of sequence. Bound by the Palimpsest's Q-Keys and a shared body, Kira and Qiao relocate to the Conservatory, a floating rehabilitation orchard tethered to the bay where stacks learn how to walk, sleep, and argue without tearing their minds in half.
Around them are others entangled by necessity and love: Pax Navarro, a teenage courier twinned with his older brother Rowan so the boy can keep his scholarship; Imani Kaleo, a botanist coalesced with her expectant partner Zea to spare their ration of air and water; and Judge Mara Halberd, a civic architect spliced with her mother, a bankrupt financier whose debts are written into her daughter's veins. But as Kira decodes anomalies—phantom pings in the Autonomy District, a false daylight cycle running beneath the Conservatory's canopy, a set of forbidden admin gates labeled simply Garden—she begins to suspect the Protocol is less medicine than leash. The body they share refuses to obey the allotted schedule; the city that promised safety is quietly pruning its citizens into obedient shapes. To survive, Kira and Qiao must decide what they're willing to overwrite: their habits, their loyalties, their names. Quantum Code Metropolis is a kinetic, unnervingly intimate story about love that outlives form, the price of order in an age of collapse, and the insurgent work of staying human when a metropolis would prefer you neatly merged, brightly measured, and perfectly silent.
