Cathedrals is a speculative literary novella about care under institutions, interior life, and the systems that continue operating long after belief has failed.

When Soren encounters an automated state interface that promises clarity and care, he steps into a process that appears neutral, helpful, and inevitable. What follows is not a story of rebellion or salvation, but an examination of how systems learn people, contain them, and continue operating even after their moral justifications collapse.

Moving between institutional procedure and interior experience, Cathedrals explores surveillance disguised as service, care administered through machinery, and the quiet forms of refusal that persist beneath visibility. The novel is concerned less with technological futures than with present conditions: compliance without conviction, participation without consent, and the fragile work of remaining human inside structures designed to outlast meaning.

Cathedrals was drafted with the use of generative AI as a writing tool; readers who wish to draw a firm boundary around such work should do so with full information.

This is the first book in The Quiet Current Sequence, a series of standalone novellas examining how people live, care, and refuse within systems.