Alignment Bureau

For nine years, Seth Archer has lived with an experimental implant in his skull, the last working device from a trial everyone else has forgotten. When his company announces it will shut the old hardware down for good, Seth does what any brilliant, slightly reckless engineer would do. He builds something better in secret.He calls it the Twin: a model trained on his own brain that predicts each movement a moment before he makes it, and quietly helps it happen. Overnight he is faster, sharper, half a beat ahead of everyone in the room.Then the half beat grows. He catches a pen before it falls. He answers questions no one has asked yet. He remembers switching the machine off while four cameras show him sitting perfectly still, never touching the button.As an internal audit closes in, Seth lets his oldest friend take the blame. His wife starts keeping a list of the things he won't tell her. A retired engineer shows him records from a government program that was supposed to have ended twenty years ago, and a woman from an office with no name tells him he has been observed since the summer.Someone stole his data. Someone else wants the man it came from, alive and with the device intact. And the only instrument Seth still trusts is the one inside his own head.A near-future techno-thriller about prediction, control and the moment a person can no longer tell what he chose from what was chosen for him.