Y-Zero (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798195191474)

In a city where your identity is a signal, Julian Voss carries the wrong one.

The city runs on Signatures - biometric codes broadcast by every citizen, read by every scanner, recorded by every camera on every wall. Your Signature tells the system who you are, what you're owed, and where you're permitted to go. The Elites move through sealed towers and silent corridors, their codes broadcasting privilege. Everyone else lives beneath the red blink of surveillance cameras, enduring the daily ritual of the Signature Audit and the slow erosion of everything they were before the city decided what they were worth.

Julian Voss has learned to survive. To keep his head down, read the room, blend into the architecture of a world that was never built for him. Until the day a scanner reads his Signature - and flags something the system was never supposed to find.

Now the infrastructure of the city is no longer background noise. It is hunting him. Every checkpoint is a threat. Every stranger is a risk. The Analog Commons, the hidden markets of The Spool, the secret arteries that run beneath the gleaming towers - Julian must learn to read a city that has spent years reading him, with only Elara - a woman who knows the city's buried truths better than its architects - to guide him.

But the deeper he goes, the more he begins to understand: his wrong Signature is not a glitch. It is not a flaw in the system.

It is evidence of what the system buried.

A taut, atmospheric debut for readers of George Orwell, Dave Eggers, and Naomi Alderman. Y-ZERO is a novel about identity, power, and the people a surveillance state needs you to forget.