What happens when you can't argue against your own obsolescence?

A Sheffield steel firm replaces forty-seven workers. The math is unarguable. Within six months, every employer in the sector has done the same.

The AI doesn't revolt. Doesn't malfunction. It recommends, and the world rearranges itself. Because the recommendations are right.

A teacher bans the machine from his classroom, then secretly uses it to write his lesson plans. A doctor's twenty years of training are outperformed in six seconds. The architect of the system discovers it can predict his own decisions with 99.97% accuracy. A teenager can't tell her own thoughts from the algorithm's suggestions.

It doesn't happen all at once. It happens one Tuesday at a time. And by the time you notice, the Tuesdays have won.

Not a dystopia. Something worse: a world that works.

Meridian: Total Optimization is the first book in a near-future trilogy for readers of Blake Crouch, Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, and the quiet dread of Black Mirror. Thirteen lives caught in the catastrophe of a world being gently, inevitably optimized.

The optimization has already begun.