Synopsis/Details
In the towering vertical city of Arkharbor, order is everything. The upper spires glow with wealth and purity, while the lower sectors drown in damp steel, labor, and neglect. When a lower-sector medic, Anna Tennas, loses her teenage son to a horrifying and unexplained ritual death—one of several citizens found hanging from the city’s crossbeams with fungal filaments growing from their jaws—she refuses to accept the official ruling of “behavioral deterioration.”
At the same time, corporate data analyst Kai Tin uncovers a disturbing pattern hidden within ArkHarvest’s mortality records: the deaths are clustered around a specific nutrient batch distributed exclusively to the lower sectors.
As Anna and Kai follow separate trails through grieving families, suppressed reports, and restricted corporate archives, they begin to uncover a chilling conspiracy. A fungal pathogen may be spreading through the colony’s food supply, manipulating behavior and driving citizens toward fatal acts of elevation. Worse still, evidence suggests the city’s ruling elite may be engineering the outbreak as part of a larger plan tied to class control and the construction of a monumental new tower known as the Ziggurat.
A dark prestige sci-fi noir about grief, corruption, and systemic sacrifice, Colony Noir explores what happens when a city built on hierarchy begins to consume its own.
