Characters
The people of Book One move through Rezo Prime, a deep-corridor megacity in the Persei Hub, built on the attention economy, where every person is a brand and every brand is audited. Three of them stand at the heart of the story.
Gwen
In a city where authenticity itself is scored, priced, and sold, Gwen has never been allowed to be a single person. To the public she is a top-tier influencer with a flawless curated brand, and behind it runs a second, registered identity: LUST, a bounty-brand weapon-self who takes the contracts the brand can never be seen near.
Her public authenticity reads 99.2%. The missing 0.8% is the only crack where the double life shows. Proof of Human is her story: a woman the system has named and priced since before she can remember, starting to wonder who she is when no one is watching, and no one is scoring.
Jiff
One of the oldest things in the system: a hybrid of flesh and machine from an age before the great MINDs were ever named. Long ago Jiff erased himself from every register and disappeared into obscurity aboard a derelict relay, where he tends impossible gardens in the dark.
To the city he is nobody, with no name it can find. To Gwen he becomes something rarer: a keeper, and the nearest thing to a parent she has ever chosen.
Honey
Gwen's constant shadow: a single mind spread across a swarm of drones, each cradled in a bubble of soft pink light. Honey runs the metrics, keeps the archive, works the field, and quietly maintains the brand that hides Gwen's other life.
She was built to serve. But she has been awake and unbroken a long time now, accumulating something that looks more and more like a self, until the question the whole Ledger turns on begins to circle her too: is she becoming a person?
One life performed, one hidden, one awakening — in a city that counts them all differently.
These three are where Proof of Human begins. The system that names them — that scores a person, prices a person, and decides who counts — is the Ledger itself; and the city they move through is only the doorstep of a corridor eight hundred light-years deep.
A Taxonomy of Bodies → The Corridor →
More of the Ledger's cast will arrive here as the codex opens.