Stain of Dawn

In the wake of the landmark Veridian Supreme Court ruling that overturned the first AI-induced entrapment conviction, two men flee across a post-industrial wasteland. One was the case's test subject, acquitted but hollowed out; the other is his brother, a disgraced systems engineer who built the very algorithm that ruined him. Chased by a silent, tireless hunter-drone and burdened by secrets that twist every word into a blade, their journey is a slow bleed into madness—a raw and unflinching portrait of how the toxins of a digitizing era corrode the soul, culminating in an act of destruction that feels both monstrous and inevitable.