In the distant future, man has moved to other worlds and created new social and political structures. One such society is the Empire, the dominant technical society on the world, ruled by thirty aristocratic families and two unnamed families that must keep the rest in check. Explore this world through the eyes of the young heir to one of the unnamed families has he comes of age and takes on the responsibilities of his heritage.
A century ago, an alien system wrote itself into the mind of every sentient being in known space. No warning. No permission. Six stats, a designation, and a neural overlay that measures what you are — whether you wanted to know or not.
They call it the Integration. Its creators, the Architects, are gone. The alien Vethari have lived under it for six centuries and won't say what they've learned. At the edges of mapped space, the Unintegrated — entities the system cannot classify — are pushing inward. And across the galaxy, oligarch dynasties and corporate empires wage a cold war over territory, system resources, and Architect relics that predate every living species.
Between them: the Fringe, where the system's rules thin out and people who don't fit go to disappear.
The Integration Era follows soldiers and civilians, operatives and outcasts, across a galaxy where everyone carries a stat screen and nobody agrees on what the numbers mean — from the day the system first ignited to a present where its oldest mystery is about to crack open.
The system is always watching. It has opinions about what it sees.