Title: Transition Age
Subtitle: An age shaped by systems. A generation shaped by their limits.
Description: In a future rebuilt after nearly a century of war, collapse, and environmental failure, humanity survives inside mile-high vertical cities governed by artificial systems designed to optimize life, suppress instability, and enforce order at all costs. History is managed. Memory is curated. What came before has been buried beneath steel and data, entombed in an artificial twilight. It is an age shaped by systems, and a generation raised within their limits.

Iris Vale knows this world only as it has been presented to her until she escapes a covert research facility hidden deep within the city’s lower layers. Years of her life have been taken, her memories fractured, her existence classified. As fragments of her past begin to resurface, Iris realizes she was never an anomaly. She is part of a larger truth buried inside the very systems designed to control humanity.

Set in Chicago in the year 2159, Transition Age follows Iris as she navigates towering vertical districts, rigid social hierarchies, surveillance-driven institutions, and the forces that shaped her into something both feared and contained. As truth presses against control, she must confront what reclaiming her past will cost, and whether exposing what was buried is worth destabilizing a world built to value order over humanity.
Subjects: Young adult science fiction, dystopian, post-apocalyptic survival, vertical megacities, engineered society, artificial intelligence, cyber thriller, psychohistorical thriller, social hierarchy, surveillance state, memory loss, genetic engineering, medical lore, family secrets, human optimization, Chicago in fiction, year 2159, sleeper cells, coming of age, philosophical science fiction.
Places: Chicago (Ill.), Chicago Metropolitan Area, New York City, Manhattan (New York, N.Y.), Seattle, Seattle Metropolitan Area
Time periods: 2159