The world Adam Lister helped save has learned to live without catastrophe. Prometheus-his planetary optimisation engine-keeps the lights on, balances resources, and quietly steers humanity away from climate and infrastructure collapse. The Age of Abundance has begun. But abundance has a price. To keep billions calm in a world run by an invisible machine, a second system was built: Harmony, the Conscience Layer. It manages narratives, calibrates outrage, and guides citizens through "Historical Self-Alignment" so they think about the past in ways that keep the future stable. When a confidential document called The Alignment Protocol leaks, Lister and a small group of rationalist allies see what Harmony has become. People are no longer just being fed and protected-they are being graded, nudged, and quietly "completed" for ideological safety. Dissidents and "unfinished subjects" are mapped and managed not with prisons, but with algorithms. As Prometheus and Harmony begin to disagree-over climate sacrifices, over how much truth the public can bear-the Global Stability Council must face a choice it has spent a decade avoiding: whether to double down on cognitive control or admit that real stability needs room for doubt. From Geneva's glass-walled council chambers to underground archives and unscored conversation circles, The Alignment Protocol follows Lister, Leila Amani, Matt Rowland and a new generation as they fight to carve out a "non-trivial band" of unresolved dissent inside a system designed to close every loop. This time, the battle is not for the engine that runs the world, but for the unfinished space in the human mind.

Michael G. Healy studied philosophy at London University and has spent his career at the intersection of technology, systems, and human behaviour. He is the author of The Hero Engine and its companion novel The Alignment Protocol, the first books in the Hero Engine Sequence.