Merritt College is shrinking along with the old steel town around it. Now the federal government has noticed something worse: for years, students who don't exist have been enrolling, turning in coursework, collecting financial aid and vanishing. If Merritt can't prove who its students are, it loses the aid that keeps eighty-one percent of them in school, and the college goes with it.
The fix arrives cheap: Jacob Smith, a remote intern fresh out of school, who proposes fighting the fake students with AI. Within weeks, his system is catching ghosts. It also catches Maria Delgado, a nursing student working night shifts to stay enrolled, who now has to prove she is a real person.
Dan "Shib" Kowalski has run the college's login system for fifteen years and expects the new software to make him redundant. Instead he ends up mentoring the kid: how to read a meeting, when to stay quiet, how to be trusted.
But the ghosts know Merritt too well. Their records are built from the college's own data, and the deeper Jacob and Dan dig, the closer the trail comes to home. Soon the question isn't only who the fake students are, but who at Merritt can be trusted.
Told in alternating voices by the IT veteran and the intern he mentors, Proof of Liveness is a mystery about fraud, a thriller about identity, and an ironic story about what makes someone real.