Who owns the present? In The Present Tense, a city not far from ours answers with policy, not propaganda. During "stability hours," an algorithmic armor called Loop v2 buffers everything live into safer, delayed narratives. Ambulances wait on context; truth arrives neatly captioned. When neighborhood organizer Lena Park and civil servant Elise Varga learn how to breathe across network anchors-twenty seconds on, twelve off-they turn minutes into a commons the system can't easily tax. What begins as mutual aid becomes a citywide experiment in civic tech: unsponsored True Time minutes, seconds banks, and a no-hero rule that treats stamina as a public safety risk.
As a once-in-a-decade storm bears down, the Exchange floods feeds with "Trusted" clips to dilute attention. The community answers with small, exact lives: a shelter counting beds, a bus captain reading names, a librarian closing on time. Deputy Commissioner Harold Linden faces his own hinge-sign a memo that hard-locks the city, or let people own the now. What follows is equal parts near-future thriller and procedural grace: a harbor-step hearing streamed minute by minute, an emergency lawsuit from industry, and a 48-hour sprint to write PSR-1, the Public Safety Real-Time Ordinance. Ten minutes per hour per anchor are reserved for cooling, shelter, EMS, school comms; dashboards publish ranges instead of secrets; the community real-time redline bans ads and data capture where breath is the point.
This is dystopian sci-fi without nihilism, a techno-thriller that swaps gunfights for governance, and a humane riff on cyberpunk that trades neon for clipboards. It asks the urgent questions of AI ethics and surveillance capitalism while staying grounded in food lines, eye-strain protocols, and the discipline of stopping on time. If climate fiction for you means storms that test institutions more than buildings, you'll find a home here. By the time True Time Hour becomes weekly ritual and the ordinance grows teeth, the victory feels like the best kind: boring enough to last-until a far-off undersea cable hums with the next story.
For readers of Station Eleven, The Parable of the Sower, and Black Mirror-a fiercely hopeful novel about attention, law, and the work of keeping a city live.
