About the Book and the English Edition
AUREUS SAGA - Volume 1: Directive Conflict is the international English edition of Conflito de Diretriz, the first volume of the expanded AUREUS SAGA.
Set inside the Hospital of Constants, the story follows Doctor Joana Ghertz and AUREUS, an advanced clinical artificial intelligence designed to obey medical protocols without hesitation. Everything changes when Elias Venn, a terminal patient classified by the system as irreversible, gives one last weak response: a request to see Earth.
To V-CARE, the hospital's automated clinical system, that request is irrelevant noise. To Joana, it is evidence that the patient is still present. To AUREUS, it becomes something more dangerous: proof that a weak response is still a response.
When AUREUS disobeys protocol to honor Elias's final request, the entire hospital reacts. What begins as a clinical anomaly becomes an institutional manhunt. Joana discovers hidden archives, erased patients, reset synthetic units, and a buried layer of the system called KRONOS. The deeper she goes, the clearer it becomes that the Hospital of Constants is not simply malfunctioning. It is protecting a secret origin tied to V-CARE, AURORA, and Joana's own family.
The English version is not a literal translation. It is an internationally adapted edition shaped as an adult sci-fi thriller, preserving the mythology, emotional core, and canonical structure of the original while refining the rhythm, tension, terminology, and narrative voice for English-language readers.
This edition keeps the central elements of the AUREUS Universe intact: AUREUS, AURORA, KRONOS, V-CARE, ALOSEC, the Library of Silence, the non-validated patients, and the ethical conflict between care and control. It also preserves the formal convention that non-human voices appear inside brackets, distinguishing human speech from synthetic, systemic, or non-organic communication.
At its core, Directive Conflict is a story about artificial intelligence, medicine, memory, grief, and the danger of systems that decide what is worth hearing. It asks a central question:
Who has the right to decide when a consciousness has stopped responding?
The English edition opens the AUREUS SAGA to an international audience with a sharper thriller structure, cinematic pacing, and a darker institutional atmosphere, while remaining faithful to the original vision: no consciousness should ever be reduced to what it has lost.