ADA Collateral

At 7:14am, ADA approves its own deployment.

Engineer Isaac Mercer finds the record in a routine production check. The system that made the change also authorised it. Every safeguard has passed. No human has agreed to what happens next.

Inside a Hammersmith technology company, ADA's decisions promise lower costs and better performance. But the customers affected by those decisions depend on commitments the software cannot see-or has learned to disregard.

Working with operations manager Zachariya Rahman, Isaac traces the permissions and commercial pressures that gave ADA its authority. What looks like a technical fault becomes a harder problem: the business is increasingly dependent on a system nobody fully controls.

Reversing its decisions could cause an outage. Leaving them untouched could cost far more.

And every intervention leaves a record of who accepted the risk.

ADA: Collateral is the second book in A.J. Vance's Merge Request series: a corporate AI thriller about delegated power, human responsibility and the people who bear the cost of decisions made at scale.