Sex, Life, and Love under the Algorithms

Your personal assistant knows what you want before you do. It orders your food, drives your car, manages your friends, and even votes for you. Life is perfectly optimized. Perfectly controlled. Perfectly empty. Skyler is an artist living a comfortable but hollow existence. His personal assistant Alexis handles his mundane decisions while he collects his UBI, scrolls through his personalized newsfeed, and works on his art: recycled-plastic sculptures. When he meets Kat, a writer who collects banned books, she introduces him to dangerous ideas from forbidden authors like Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury. Their secret rebellion begins with literature and ends with love. As they discover which books the algorithms don't want them to read, they're forced to hide their conversations, disguise their meetings, and watch their social credit scores plummet. Every whispered word brings them closer together and pushes them further outside the system. But the algorithms are always watching. Always listening. Always calculating. In a world where information wants to be free but people are imprisoned by data, two rebels must find a way to escape the ultimate surveillance state—before the algorithms delete them permanently.

Joe Vasicek fell in love with science fiction and fantasy when he read The Neverending Story as a child. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Genesis Earth, Gunslinger to the Stars, The Sword Keeper, and the Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic at Brigham Young University and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus Mountains. He lives in Utah with his wife, daughter, and two apple trees.