THE ATTESTATION LINE

Jonah Kess has spent eleven years doing the last honest job left in a fully automated factory: staring into a scanner and staking his name on machines that could kill someone if they failed. It's tedious, unglamorous work — until a transit pod crashes and the wreckage traces back to a component he certified. There's just one problem. He wasn't there. He was at his daughter's hospital bedside when the system logged his eye.

What Jonah uncovers is worse than a glitch: a corporate program that can generate a synthetic copy of his own biometric signature and use it to forge his approval on parts he's never inspected — quietly, selectively, thousands of times, whenever a shipping deadline mattered more than the truth. And someone in the company already knows he's figured it out.

With a blacklisted journalist, a foreman carrying a decade of guilt, and a forgotten legal loophole that might be the one thing a machine can't fake, Jonah has six weeks to prove what happened before the company buries the evidence — and him — for good.

The Attestation Line is a near-future technothriller about the last line of defense between automation and catastrophe: a single person willing to actually look. Fans of corporate conspiracy thrillers, AI paranoia fiction, and slow-burn whistleblower dramas will tear through this one.

What happens when the only thing standing between a machine and disaster is a signature the machine learned to fake?