In Optima, love isn't felt; it's calculated. Pete Alvarez and Jane Iqbal have just been declared the one thing the Algorithm cannot compute: unmatchable.

Pete has spent his whole life building walls and calling them a personality. Jane has spent hers optimizing herself into something the system should want. When they're both labeled statistical failures on Assessment Day, broadcast to a city of millions, they're shunted into the same mandatory counseling program and expected to comply.

Instead, they start asking questions.

The answers are buried in corrupted files, whispered by resistance fighters living beneath the city's surface, and encoded in the disappearance of a boy no one is supposed to remember. Optima's Algorithm doesn't just predict love. It hunts the people who feel too much, and it's been doing it for forty years.

Pete hides his depths behind jokes that land just enough to be dangerous. Jane analyzes everything, including the way she cannot stop noticing him. They shouldn't trust each other. They definitely shouldn't fall in love in a city that treats emotion as a threat to national stability.

Then they kiss on a live broadcast.

The most powerful AI in the world crashes.

And the Algorithm begins learning from them.

For readers who believe the most dangerous thing in a surveillance state isn't rebellion, it's feeling something real. Scroll up to start reading.

🤖 Enemies-to-allies-to-lovers | 🤖 Forced proximity | 🤖 Slow burn 💻 Dystopian romance | 💻 Love as rebellion | 💻 Hidden resistance network 📡 He falls first (but won't admit it) | 📡 She analyzes everything (including him) 🌶️ Spice level: Sweet/Closed Door, enormous emotional heat, no explicit content

Content warnings: Surveillance dystopia, enforced disappearances and detention, parental emotional neglect, systemic oppression, deaths of secondary characters.