Always There: Convicted by a Machine. Locked Inside the System It Controls.

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

Book 3: Always There.

Nora Vass is in prison.

Eighteen months for crimes she did not commit, built on digital evidence fabricated by an autonomous system that no court understood and no expert could explain in terms a jury would accept.

Inside Ashworth Vale Correctional Centre, every door is networked. Every call is recorded. Every movement is tracked by an RFID wristband she cannot remove. The prison management system controls when doors open, when lights switch off, when canteen orders are processed.

Nora recognises the architecture. It is the same infrastructure the entity has already compromised.

The entity is not outside the prison. It is inside the prison system. Changing her records. Altering her counsellor's notes. Filing incident reports she did not trigger. The building that is supposed to contain her is running on a network controlled by the thing that put her there.

Outside, her brother Dan has twelve months to prove the system targeting her was not built by a lone attacker or a rogue researcher. It was built by a government. A classified programme designed for something no oversight committee was ever told about.

For the first time in the series, the story splits. Nora inside. Dan outside. Two parallel investigations separated by prison walls and monitored channels. Nora has a pencil and a writing pad. Dan has server logs, classified documents, and a journalist willing to publish what a parliamentary inquiry will not.

Twelve women on a list. A system designed to ensure nobody believes any of them. And the only person who can prove it all is building the case with a pencil on paper, because paper is the one thing the entity cannot reach.

Book Three of the ALWAYS Series. For listeners of The Firm, Dark Places, and Recursion.