Base Line Human

In the shadow of the orbital rings, the world has been neatly divided: the genetically “Better” live in glittering cities in the sky, while unmodified “baselines” are paid stipends, housed in designated blocks, and quietly reduced to one function—breeding stock for the future of humanity [World Council Genetic Bureau; Baseline Housing]. Nineteen-year-old Adam Solas has always told himself he can live with that. He has friends, a tiny apartment in Garden Hills, a stubborn streak of kindness—and an orientation letter summoning him to Celestine Tower to donate the one thing the system still wants from him.
When Adam enters the Procreation Partnership program, he expects clinical procedures and polite gratitude. He doesn’t expect to care about the unseen child he’ll never raise, or to meet Celine Cho, a baseline organizer whose whispered slogan—“We are not relics. We are roots.”—pulls back the curtain on the Eden Initiative and its underground campaign against genetic caste [Eden Initiative; “We are roots” slogan]. As Adam’s quiet life tangles with street-level activism, black-market medicine, and elite researchers who see him as a promising “retrofit,” he is forced to decide whether his body, his mind, and his future will remain a managed resource—or become a weapon for his own people.
From overcrowded stairwells in Garden Hills to a high-stakes address before the Planetary Coordinating Assembly, Roots Beneath the Ring follows Adam’s transformation from compliant donor to reluctant symbol of a different future [Unified Education Initiative; Assembly keynote]. Caught between radicals who want to burn the system down and reformers trying to hack it from within, Adam and Celine must risk everything to prove that the roots humanity tried to bury can still grow upward—even toward the rings themselves.