Zero Billionaires

A few years from now, the world’s richest people begin dying — not from assassins or revolutionaries, but from the systems they built and bought to keep themselves safe. A pacemaker accepts a properly signed command. An avalanche cannon turns nine degrees past its approved range. By the end of the day, there are zero billionaires.

That’s where the story starts. Sovereignty stopped living in a building generations ago; it lives in a server farm, covered by a service agreement. You can’t storm a Bastille that’s been outsourced to a vendor — so the people who fight back build an intelligence inside the machine, and turn it inward. The killing takes an afternoon. Keeping the water running starts the next morning.

Nobody had to die because a spreadsheet decided they were too expensive.— Charlotte Vega, Zero Billionaires

Zero Billionaires follows the people who inherit the wreckage: who keeps the pumps running, who decides who gets what, when the people who owned everything suddenly own nothing. It’s the first book of Monarch, a new series — a different world from Echoes of Tomorrow, and a sharper knife.