Green Sun
A detective story in a world that had fifty years to become ordinary.
You are an agent of the Orbital Notary of Truth. You make no arrests: you establish what happened and certify it with your signature. It goes into an archive nobody can cut, and it cannot be taken back — not tomorrow, not when you learn more.
They call you in where a death has touched the interests of two powers at once and neither trusts the other’s records. The world is split into six parts; you are a stranger in all of them, tolerated exactly as long as you stay away from somebody’s secret. You are ageing without access to life extension, short on money, and part of your memory has been erased by someone.
You talk to people and work through records — you never see the scene with your own eyes, only through someone else’s. The records come from different hands: the public feed, the certified archive, whatever the right person at the port will sell you. None of them lies. Each is simply incomplete. You are the one who lies — the moment you fill in what is missing and fail to notice that you did.
Hours later a source opens that you did not have. You return to a case you closed yourself and see what stood just outside the frame. The case will not reopen. You will simply know.
The world is our own, fifty years on, built as a causal chain rather than a mood board: every institution here began as an answer to a real problem, and every winner has a matching loser. You uncover it through conversations, not exposition.
Every case gets closed. The question is how much you understand by then — and what already carries your name.
More when we are ready to show it.