The Nobi Protocol
In the year 2157, the world is held together by the legacy of one boy.
Nobita Nobi died fifty years ago. But the institutions he built with his co-founder Hideo Matsushiba — the D-Core, the Global Defence Assembly, the vast network of MS-series caretaker robots — became the scaffolding of 22nd century civilisation. Four billion machines, each one built on Doraemon's original architecture, serve humanity with the same sympathy and care that Nobita once received from a robot cat sent back through time to save him.
The causal loop that created this world is invisible to everyone living inside it. And it is about to collapse.
Three teenagers enter the Global Defence Assembly's cadet programme in the same year, for different reasons. Kaito Nobi — direct blood descendant of Nobita, exiled at fourteen under a Matsushiba corporate banishment order, living under a false name — enrolls because he has nowhere else to go and everything left to lose. Riku Voss, carrying Gian's bloodline in his bones, enrolls because Kaito does, and because twelve years ago he made a choice in a burning street that saved Kaito's life and cost three other children theirs — a debt he has never confessed and cannot stop paying. Amara Suneha, sharpest mind of the three and Shizuka's blood, enrolls not for grief or glory but for access: she has spent eight years building a case against the people responsible for the attack that scarred all three of them, and the defence sector is the only place the evidence exists.
The Backdoor Collective is a terrorist organisation twelve years into a plan to simultaneously override every MS-series caretaker on earth — turning 4.2 billion machines of care into instruments of a precise, targeted genocide. Their ideology is the dark mirror of the D-Core's: they believe the world Nobita built has made humanity too soft to survive, and they intend to replace it with a hierarchy enforced by the very machines built to embody compassion. They are not wrong that softness is a vulnerability. They are catastrophically wrong about what replaces it.