jPadilla01
Humanity learned how to look into its own past.
At first, it was harmless-just observation.
No interference. No changes. No risk.
Then time began to fracture.
Across the colonies, history starts to lose coherence. Memories repeat. Events unravel. Entire civilizations collapse without violence or warning. The more closely the past is examined, the worse the future becomes.
Elara Myles is a temporal systems analyst tasked with slowing the damage. What she uncovers instead is a truth buried under layers of procedure and "acceptable loss": the catastrophe was predicted-and allowed.
As the cost of observation becomes impossible to ignore, Elara faces a choice no model can solve. Prevent the collapse by erasing the future that created her-or let humanity continue paying for its hunger to know.
Somewhere beyond the reach of the system, a few communities survive by doing the unthinkable.
They stop being visible.
The Cost of Observation is a slow-burn, high-concept science fiction novel about power, surveillance, memory, and the dangerous belief that knowledge is always neutral.
#ScienceFiction
#HardSciFi
#Dystopian
#Philosophical
#SpeculativeFiction
#SlowBurn
#SystemFailure
#Time
#Surveillance
#SeriousSciFi