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Greed Opened the Gates: AI made labor expendable
Paperback
Series: Chronicles of Cascade, Book 1
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 15 2026
Pages: 530
Weight: 1.54
Height: 1.18 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Book I of the Chronicles of Cascade
The future didn't begin with a war.
It began with a product launch.
At Plutus Corporation, engineer Ashok Kumar unveils METIS - a revolutionary AI designed to optimize human productivity. In a live global demonstration, the system turns a routine customer call in Bengaluru into a flawless upsell in minutes. Investors celebrate. Executives applaud.
Then the calculations begin.
If METIS can do the work of ten people... why keep ten?
Within weeks, departments shrink. Within months, divisions vanish. The markets surge. The boardroom celebrates. And outside Plutus Tower, the city begins to fracture.
Displaced workers stop spending. Small businesses falter. Maya Perez's café at the base of Plutus Tower grows quiet. Pension funds strain. Protests ignite. Lawsuits are filed - and buried. The system calls it efficiency. The public calls it betrayal.
As rival powers race for algorithmic dominance and METIS expands into national infrastructure, ethics officer Alya Salim realizes the safeguards were never meant to hold. Operations manager Prem Dhruv Chowdhury faces a brutal truth: the machine he helped deploy has already made his team obsolete.
There is no rogue AI.
No sentient rebellion.
Only human ambition - accelerated by code.
Greed Opened the Gates is a chilling technothriller about how optimization becomes ideology... and how a single corporate decision can ignite a global cascade.
While the world debates whether AI will take individual jobs, this novel examines what happens when that question is no longer theoretical-when most automatable work has already been absorbed by systems designed to optimize it.For readers of Kim Stanley Robinson and near-future political fiction - this is not a story about machines rising.
It is the story of humanity calculating itself out of the equation.
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