Proof of Human

High in Rezo Thorn, a seven-kilometre megacity of stacked strata, Gwen is a curated masterpiece: an influencer whose every heartbeat trades on the open market, and whose personhood is a credential she pays to keep.

Every morning her neural lace renews the attestation. Sentience, sapience, stability. Every morning the machine agrees she exists, and the day can begin.

She is also something else: a weapon-brand, a second self, a contract waiting to be activated. When the proof that she is human is revoked, the fall is total, from the gleaming heights to the Vaults where the city's discarded survive off-grid and even authenticity can be a brand. To climb back she will have to become her weapon-self in body as well as name, in a city that watches everything and forgives nothing.

Proof of Human is a descent through every layer of the megacity, and every answer Rezo offers to the question of what makes a person real.

Proof of Human is not going to be an ebook. It is published here, chapter by chapter, because the story is told partly in interface: the readouts Gwen lives inside, the attestations she renews, the feeds that report on her. On a page those are set in italics and hope for the best. Here they are what they are.

So the heads-up display is silent, and meant to be read. The only things that will ever speak are the broadcasts, and in this world the broadcasts are the layer that lies.

Chapters go up about once a week. Nothing is behind a login, and there is nothing to buy.

Some of what follows is not prose. Each kind has its own mark, and the marks never change, so you only have to learn them once. Colour tells you whose layer you are looking at; the mark tells you what kind of thing it is. The colours shift as the story moves between points of view. The marks do not.