ARC Book

RUNTIME

Techno Thriller

It’s the year 2056, and the world no longer looks down at phones—it looks through them. AR glasses and voice-driven systems have replaced nearly every screen, turning daily life into a seamless digital layer—powered by PULSE Technologies, the invisible network behind everything. Directions float in the street. Menus appear in the air. Buildings change names without changing shape. Even people arrive pre-labeled, their identity and personal stats visible before a single word is spoken. Convenience has become infrastructure. Technology doesn’t just support life anymore—it runs it. Then comes the update. When Miles Vey hears the familiar ding of a routine software patch, he expects nothing more than another invisible tweak to the system everyone depends on. Instead, he looks up to find numbers hovering above every person he sees—years for some, days or hours for others. And above his own head: 38 minutes. Counting down. What begins as a glitch turns into terror when a stranger’s timer hits zero and the man drops dead in the street. No warning. No explanation. Just a chilling notification and the horrifying truth that the system isn’t just tracking time—it’s executing something. Now, with the clock falling and the world still blindly trusting the technology wrapped around it, Miles is thrust into a race through a future built on control, dependency, and hidden rules no one was meant to see. RUNTIME is a relentless techno-thriller that asks one terrifying question: when the system that runs your life decides your time is up… can you outrun the code?