Engagement Criteria
A seventeen-year-old colonist the system flagged and forgot is the only person alive who can read the Architect ruin waking up under his town — and reading it is the thing that will take him away from everyone he loves.
Kes is 17, graduation year, still waiting on a name the system promised and hasn't delivered. He has no Foundation. A year ago the system flagged his anomalous Flux and reclassified him High Affinity, then told him to wait: designation pending. Thirteen months on, it hasn't moved. He's the case the Fringe has no template for, a teenage high-affinity read the system is watching and won't yet name.
Everyone around him has already picked his future. Nev, his girlfriend this past year, wants them both to enlist as militia cadets together. His parents want him in the colony specialty school. He has his own restlessness, and it has no name and no slot in any of their plans. He reads on his own time, civilian archaeology feeds and old Flux survey data, and everyone treats it as a hobby that keeps him calm.
Then a survey crew running deep cores 3km outside the perimeter hits something their instruments can't read, and the colony has nobody who can. Stats are private, so no database can point at Kes. But he overhears his parents arranging to send the request up the chain, and he knows he's the answer they're missing.
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Engagement Criteria - Chapter One
A father watches the dawn and hopes his son will choose a safe, ordinary future. His son, Kes, has spent thirteen months waiting on a sentence the Integration started and never finished — *High Affinity, designation pending* — and getting nothing back. Amid breakfast banter and a swim plan with the girl who's already mapped his life, an overnight survey report surfaces: something three kilometers down that no instrument can read, under ground Kes knows far too well. The colony has no one who can read it. Kes suspects he might — and saying so would cost him a secret he's kept for a year.
Engagement Criteria - Chapter Two
Some doors feel heavier than they did that morning. With a promise to keep and a year of silence behind him, Kes sits his parents down to explain the thing he's never told them — where his anomaly really came from, and what he's quietly become since.
Engagement Criteria - Chapter Three