Contingent
Contingent is the second book in The Condition Set trilogy.
The full-timers are gone. The contractors are cheaper. The AI handles the rest. Everything is optimized — until the people who were supposed to be interchangeable turn out to be the only ones who understand what the AI is actually doing.
Rob Chen left his old company. Now he consults, telling other companies how to do what was done to his team. The irony isn't lost on him. Neither is the money.
But when a sovereign AI standard called Northstar becomes the key to cross-border deployment, the contractors aren't just cost line items anymore. They're leverage.
The second book in a trilogy about what happens when the people you kept because they were cheap become the people you need because they're real.