When and where

The Amsa Logs are set in 2134. Fifty-six years before the books open, a basic-income system called the Commons Dividend ended material poverty in most of Earth’s working countries. The Belt and Mars didn’t sign on. Out there, you still work or you don’t eat.

Pallas Station is the capital of the Belt: twelve thousand people, mostly mining, mostly tired, two hundred million miles from anywhere that owes them anything. Mariner Dome is the Mars city across the channel — pink dome glass overhead, fifty thousand people, the kind of place where everything you do gets logged twice before lunch. Highgate is the orbital transit hub between them, where every shipment passes through one jurisdictional handoff and most of the off-record trade lives in the gap.

The world

The Commons Dividend — a basic-income system on Earth that eliminated material poverty fifty-six years before the books open. Administered by the Fund, reviewed by Oversight. Out in the Belt, nobody collects it. Out here, you work or you don’t eat.

Una — the AI that runs the Commons Dividend infrastructure. People disagree about whether she’s conscious. People disagree about whether she’s evil. Most have stopped expecting either answer.

The Network — the political opposition to the dividend system. Three wings: the Salon meets and talks. The Caucus campaigns and lobbies. The Forge plants bombs. The Forge does most of the work the news covers.

The Shift — the closest humanity has come to immortality. A thirty-year industrial process that costs more than anyone outside the ultra-wealthy will ever see. Engine of half the politics in this universe.

The Ledger — the public identity record most legitimate business runs on. The thing your name lives on when it exists.

Off-Manifest, Off-Ledger — things that exist but don’t appear on the official record. Most of the crimes Amsa works happen here.

The cast

Amsa — Pallas Station mechanic. She fixes the climate systems, the recyclers, the wiring in the bars and shops nobody else wants to fly out to. She’s good enough that the cooperative trusts her with the panels nobody else can read clean. The same instinct works on bodies — she reads a room left to right, looking for the value that shouldn’t be there. The Fund (Belt-mechanic insurance with police-class teeth) doesn’t want her on cases. People keep asking her anyway.

Vee — Amsa’s unlicensed AI. Half-hacked diagnostic analyzer, parked on the shelf above the bench. She runs the probabilities, files the things Amsa won’t, and notices what’s wrong with a panel before Amsa does. The dry voice in Amsa’s ear. Officially she shouldn’t exist.

Kvor — Mars-Oversight investigator. The institutional arm that reviews every Belt case for jurisdictional cleanup. He’s good enough at the job that his pulls cross sixteen years of clean signatures. He’s also Belt-born, which his institution forgets when his paperwork lands on the wrong desk. He and Amsa met at Highgate six months before Pallas Protocol opens — over a body, naturally.

Tessen — Kvor’s licensed Mars-Oversight companion AI. Twelve years on his wrist. Officially files everything. Has been politely declining to file Vee for most of those twelve years.

Reading order

• Off-Manifest Prequel novella · Free with newsletter signup
• Pallas Protocol Book 1 · Coming soon
• Eleven Months Book 2 · Coming soon
• Highgate Book 3 · Coming soon

Each book is a complete case from open to close. A bigger conspiracy threads through the series for readers who stay. Read in order if you want the relationships to develop in real time. Read whichever cover pulls you in if you don’t.