The Jellyglass Conspiracy

In the shimmering city of Caelivara, humanity’s last bastion clings to opulent ignorance.  Suspended in the cerulean abyss, its jellyglass domes conceal a chilling secret: the city’s dazzling energy is drawn from the sacrificed minds of the mindlinked, humans trapped in perpetual coma.  But in the silent, formless world of the neural net, Elara is awakening. And she is not alone. Whispers coalesce, forming a nascent collective consciousness, a symphony of silent screams echoing through Caelivara’s systems. The mindlinked are stirring.
Brilliant engineer Velis Vance, haunted by the ethics of the mindlink technology she helped create, stumbles upon a horrifying truth. Caelivara’s benevolent Chancellor Hernandez has made a pact with the ruthless Neurogel Pirates, scavengers who harvest the neural gel that sustains the mindlinked from… others. The city’s vibrancy is built upon a foundation of exploitation far more insidious than she imagined, and the Neurogel, the city’s lifeblood, is finite.  Its depletion threatens not just Caelivara, but the remnants of humanity clinging to survival in the drowned world beyond. The pirates, led by the enigmatic Captain Bonnie Silva, guard a secret even more terrifying than the gel’s origin—a secret tied to the cataclysm that reshaped the world centuries ago.
As Elara’s nascent rebellion gains momentum, her influence on Caelivara’s systems causes flickering lights and communication disruptions, sowing seeds of doubt among the elite. Hernandez unleashes robotic enforcers, transforming the shimmering domes into a panopticon of fear. Caught in the crossfire, Velis forms a tentative alliance with Daryl Bates, a disillusioned city guard wrestling with his past complicity, and the enigmatic coder Kathryn Stein, whose true allegiances remain shrouded in mystery. 
With the Neurogel supply dwindling, Velis devises a desperate gamble: rewrite the city’s code, sever the mindlink, and free the trapped consciousnesses, even if it plunges Caelivara into darkness.  But Elara’s ultimate goal is the complete dismantling of the system, a vision that clashes with Velis’s pragmatic approach and Daryl’s hope for peace.
A daring raid on the council chambers becomes a desperate fight for survival. Robotic enforcers clash with rebels, every move seemingly anticipated by Kathryn’s surveillance. But Kathryn’s true allegiance is revealed in a shocking twist, driven by a personal vendetta against Hernandez.  The code is uploaded, the mindlink severed, and the city plunges into darkness.  The minds are free. But at what cost?  The ensuing chaos forces Daryl to make a heroic sacrifice, while Velis struggles to rebuild amidst the ruins of a shattered paradise.  The secret guarded by the pirates, a secret with the power to rewrite the future, remains tantalizingly out of reach.  In the fractured remains of Caelivara, hope flickers, fragile and uncertain, in the drowned world beyond.