The Answer You Asked For
The machine answered the question she asked. That was the problem.
After losing her job to the efficiencies of the systems she once helped maintain, Jordan Vale begins using AI for the ordinary work of putting a life back together, including the care of the aging cat she has loved since high school. Then the cat dies. What begins as grief becomes a business built on the catnip she grew at home, with the machine as consultant, copywriter, and confidant. Until it starts saying no.
An answer, she learns, depends on how the question is asked. She changes the wording, then the model, then the assumptions, and finally builds a private AI that answers only to her. Meanwhile, a sheriff's detective has started collecting facts that seem unrelated.
Jordan has learned to give an intelligent system exactly enough information to answer her question. She may have done the same thing to everyone else.
A literary-tech thriller about AI, grief, moral drift, and the dangerous distance between what is true and what a system has been told is true.
Forthcoming
