Live Floor: An Incident Board Thriller, Prequel Novella (The Incident Board)

She knelt in a green aisle. It turned blue. At 2:46 a.m. in a fulfillment center in Indiana, 640 robots share a floor the size of eleven football fields with the people who pick the heavy stock. A light over every manual aisle says who it belongs to: green for people, blue for the machines. Dani Marsh, six days from her health insurance, is kneeling at a floor bin with a forty-pound carton in her hands when the light over her head changes. By nine the company's statement is out. Unauthorized entry into an active drive zone. The automated systems performed as designed. Nora Kessling is the new Investigator-in-Charge at a small federal board that can subpoena anything and punish no one. This is her first case in charge and the Board's first warehouse, in the week the industry's lobby is arguing that robot floors should be exempt from the Board altogether. She arrives with a team of four, a notebook with a time column ruled down the margin, and about fifty hours. The robots' own memory of that night overwrites itself after forty-eight hours of operation. The company has already wiped the drive that killed her. The same feature is running tonight at thirteen other sites, and a national sale starts Friday morning. The camera says Dani was inside the aisle six minutes before it changed. The fleet manager's log says the aisle was empty. Both are true, and that is the problem. Who turned a manual aisle into a road? Why did a floor that counts everybody count one woman as nobody? And what will Nora have to walk into, at one in the morning, wearing the same tags, to get the evidence before it is gone? Live Floor is a technically grounded thriller for readers who want the machine to be plausible, the people to be competent, and the human cause under the failure to be the real mystery. Every book in The Incident Board is a complete case: a near-future disaster caused by an automated system, a company that blames the person in the chair within hours, and a small team that has to prove what the screen showed. Each closes with a finding, and each finding leaves one question for the next. This prequel novella (about 21,000 words, an evening's read) introduces Nora Kessling and the Groveport team. Their first full-length case, Last Known Good, is available now