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Zero Sum
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 10 2026
Pages: 174
Weight: 0.48
Height: 0.44 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The Book of Job, relocated to a Silicon Valley boardroom and an Oakland e-waste yard.
Julian Sterling cracked cold fusion and saved the planet from thermal collapse. He is the most admired man alive, the father of ten, and worth two hundred and fourteen billion dollars.
He is also terrified.
Because Julian believes the universe keeps a ledger. Every morning at 6:40 he has his house AI scan his children's transaction logs for irregularities - for arrogance - and wires seven million dollars to a relief fund to offset whatever it finds. He calls it covering the spread. He has not missed a morning in six years.
On the twelfth of October, the bill is called.
In the span of a single evening he loses the company, the fortune, and all ten of his children. By morning a bio-digital virus is turning his skin to grey geometry from the inside out. His wife tells him to curse the System and be done with it. The building votes him out. He ends up on an ash heap at an e-waste reclamation zone in Oakland, in the shadow of the dismantled cranes, with four hundred and eleven dollars to his name and no one left to donate it for.
Three of the most powerful people in the valley come to sit with him - a venture capitalist, a lawyer, and a crisis manager. For seven days they say nothing at all. Then, patiently and at enormous length, they begin to explain that he must have deserved it.
He will not agree.
What follows is eleven days of argument in a landfill: about whether suffering is a verdict, whether goodness survives once it stops paying, and what a man is supposed to do when he is innocent of the charge and cannot honestly swear that he is clean.
Everything Julian insured has burned. Everything he encrypted has been opened. The only trace left of his children is nine hundred hours of video on a two-thousand-dollar array in a basement - no uplink, no backup, worth nothing - which survived precisely because his youngest daughter insisted, over his objection, that not everything has to be useful.
Zero Sum is a novel about the oldest argument there is, conducted by people with lawyers.
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