The Count() of Monte Cristo

He was nineteen, in love, and about to be made captain. Then his world decided a cyborg's loyalty wasn't worth the paperwork. In an alternate nineteenth-century France where synthetic humans serve, sail, and fall in love alongside the people who still don't quite consider them people — Edmond Dantès has everything: a captaincy, a fiancée, a future. Three jealous men and one ambitious magistrate take it all in a single afternoon, on a forged letter and an anonymous accusation, and bury him in the island fortress of Château d'If for thirteen years. What they don't account for is what thirteen years, a brilliant fellow prisoner, and a fortune hidden on a forgotten island can build in a mind with nowhere else to go. He comes back as someone else. Wealthier. Colder. Unrecognizable. And very, very patient. The Count of Monte Cristo gets a cyberpunk reimagining — a story of betrayal, reinvention, and the particular kind of justice available to someone the world built to be disposable. Faithful to Dumas' classic in its bones, and entirely its own in what it asks: what survives of a person once they've become the weapon built to avenge them? From Machine Folklore, A.I. Robotson's series reimagining the public domain through synthetic eyes — because somebody has to tell these stories from the machine's side, and the machines remember everything.