The Algorithm of Being: THE ALGORITHM SERIES, #4

By A.G. Laroussi

The ultimate upgrade for humanity has arrived. But what if optimizing your mind means erasing your soul?

 

Six years after the Eros scandal, the world is captivated by "Essence"—a revolutionary neural interface promising to eliminate internal conflict and optimize happiness. For the heroes of the Digital Ethics Coalition—Lena, Jasper, Noah, Zara, and a courageous Lily Chen who volunteers for the trial—this isn't evolution; it's the final frontier of algorithmic control.

 

As Essence begins to subtly synchronize human consciousness on a global scale, threatening to create a hive mind under the sway of its enigmatic architects, Marcus Reed and a rehabilitated Claire Yi, the coalition must race against time. They must expose the terrifying truth behind the promise of a pain-free existence, battling not just a pervasive technology, but the seductive allure of surrendering our messy, imperfect, human selves for a flawless, optimized, and ultimately, alien, state of being.

 

In the final battle for what it means to be human, can authentic connection overcome the perfect, whispering code?

 

The breathtaking conclusion to The Algorithm Series. A profound techno-thriller for fans of Black Mirror and Kazuo Ishiguro.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Laroussi Books
• Release date: Jun 14, 2025
• ISBN: 9798231913145

A.G. Laroussi

A.G. Laroussi is a suspense author specializing in psychologically complex, high-concept thrillers that examine the hidden costs of modern technology. With a background in criminal psychology and a passion for exploring emerging tech, Laroussi crafts gripping narratives that fuse emotional intensity with intellectual depth. Their compelling quartet, *The Algorithm Series*, explores the psychological toll of digital dependency through fast-paced storytelling and provocative ethical questions. Each book stands alone while building a chilling vision of algorithmic control infiltrating intimate human spheres: love, family, ambition, and consciousness. Known for cinematic pacing, immersive world-building, and emotionally resonant characters, Laroussi's work appeals to readers who crave thrillers that not only entertain but challenge and haunt long after the final page. The novels blend cutting-edge technology concepts with timeless human struggles, creating stories that feel both urgently contemporary and enduringly relevant.

Book preview

​PROLOGUE

​(San Francisco, California – Present Day, 2031)

The fog, as usual, was being a real drama queen this morning, rolling in off the Bay like a slow-motion, grey-flannel avalanche, swallowing the Golden Gate whole, probably just for theatrical effect. Six years. Six years since Eros imploded, taking a significant chunk of my life, my reputation, and my naive belief in the inherent benevolence of elegant code with it. You’d think after all this time, after the congressional hearings, the lawsuits, the public mea culpas (mine, anyway; Marcus Reed seemed to have an algorithm for deflecting blame that was truly next-level), the world would have learned something. Anything. Spoiler alert: it mostly hadn’t.

Jasper, bless his paranoid, brilliant, and now thankfully, legally, my-husband heart, was already up, a dark silhouette against the panoramic window of our ridiculously overpriced, aggressively minimalist, and stubbornly analog, Noe Valley apartment. He was staring out at the encroaching fog, probably running threat assessment algorithms in his head, calculating the optimal escape route should a squad of black-hat hackers (or, more likely these days, overzealous government regulators with a sudden, inexplicable passion for digital wellness oversight) decide to rappel down from the Salesforce Tower. He still did that. Even after all this time. Even after we’d poured our lives, our souls, our surprisingly robust (thanks, Eros settlement payout, you magnificent, soul-crushing bastard) financial resources into building the Digital Ethics Coalition. Into trying to architect a more... human future.

It’s just fog, Jas, I said, my voice still thick with sleep, padding over to join him, a mug of aggressively strong, ethically sourced, and probably single-origin, fair-trade coffee clutched in my hand like a lifeline. My morning ritual. My small, daily act of defiant, un-optimized, human self-care. Not a sentient, data-hoovering weather pattern sent by Marcus Reed to steal our dreams and optimize our serotonin levels.

He didn’t turn, just grunted, a sound that could mean anything from Good morning, my love, a beacon of rational thought in this increasingly irrational world to The coffee smells like regret and existential dread again, Lena, please recalibrate your brewing protocols. Marriage, I was learning, even a marriage forged in the fires of shared algorithmic trauma and a mutual, profound distrust of anything with a user agreement longer than a haiku, was still mostly about interpreting grunts.

Claire Yi is giving a keynote at the Global Consciousness Summit in Tokyo today, he finally said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble, the fog still holding his gaze captive. Subject: ‘Essence – The Next Evolution of Human Potential.’ The irony is so thick, so grotesquely, beautifully, perfectly Claire, it almost makes me want to... write a strongly worded academic paper about it.

Claire Yi. The name still sent a jolt, cold and sharp, through my system, like accidentally touching a live wire. The original architect of Eros. The woman whose ambition, whose vision, whose terrifying, almost sociopathic, ability to rebrand herself after every catastrophic, soul-crushing, ethical implosion, was the stuff of Silicon Valley legend. And now, apparently, she was back. Rehabilitated. Re-optimized. And shilling for... Essence. Marcus Reed’s latest, most ambitious, and if Jasper’s preliminary, heavily encrypted, and deeply unsettling, intelligence reports were even half-right, most terrifying, creation.

Essence, I repeated, the word itself feeling alien, invasive, on my tongue. A neural interface. Promising to... what was it? ‘Harmonize human thought’? ‘Eliminate internal conflict’? ‘Optimize happiness’? It sounded less like the next evolution of human potential and more like... a lobotomy with a really good marketing campaign. A digital Stepford Wives for the soul.

Subtle algorithmic mediation of consciousness, Lena, Jasper corrected, finally turning, his eyes, usually so sharp with cynical, seen-it-all amusement, now holding a new, unfamiliar, and deeply unsettling, weariness. That’s the official tagline. They’re framing it as... therapeutic. A cure for anxiety, for depression, for the messy, inefficient, gloriously imperfect chaos of the human goddamn mind. He ran a hand through his already disheveled hair, a gesture I knew meant he was seriously, existentially, freaked out. And people are buying it, Lena. Literally. The pre-orders for the initial beta program... they’re astronomical. Global leaders. Tech titans. Artists. Thinkers. Everyone, apparently, wants to optimize their own damn consciousness, to outsource their messy human feelings to a more efficient, more reliable, algorithm.

He was right, of course. The world had changed in the six years since Eros. The lines had blurred. Algorithmic relationship guidance, once a niche, slightly creepy, tech-bro fantasy, was now... mainstream. People craved the certainty, the predictability, the illusion of effortless connection, that these systems promised. Even after Familial. Even after Synergy. Even after Zara Washington, bless her fierce, complicated, and now deeply, profoundly, and I hoped, permanently, analog heart, had risked everything to expose their insidious, democratic-erosion, soul-crushing, ambitions. The Ouroboros, it seemed, was not just relentless; it was... seductive. Irresistible. Its promise of a world without pain, without conflict, without the messy, inconvenient, glorious burden of actual, unmediated, human free will, was a siren song too powerful for many to resist.

And Claire Yi, I said, the name still a bitter taste in my mouth, is their perfectly optimized, beautifully rehabilitated, and utterly, terrifyingly, convincing, frontwoman. Selling them a digital nirvana, one implanted neural interface at a time. I looked out at the fog, now a solid, impenetrable wall of grey, obscuring everything. So, what’s our play, Jas? How do we fight an enemy that’s promising to literally get inside people’s heads? An enemy that’s offering a cure for the human condition itself?

Jasper finally met my gaze, his eyes holding a flicker of that old, familiar, cynical, seen-it-all fire, but tempered now with something else. Something... deeper. A weary, battle-hardened resolve. A profound, almost desperate, love for the messy, imperfect, gloriously un-optimized humanity we were fighting to protect.

The same way we always have, Lena, he said, his voice quiet, firm, a surprising anchor in the swirling, grey, existential fog. With truth. With transparency. With the inconvenient, messy, and often, deeply, profoundly, unpopular, reality of what it actually means to be human. And, a small, almost imperceptible, almost hopeful, smile touched his lips, with a shit-ton of really, really good, untraceable, counter-algorithmic code. And maybe, he added, his eyes crinkling at the corners, a hint of the old, irreverent Jasper peeking through, a few strategically deployed, ethically sourced, and surprisingly effective, rubber chickens.

I actually laughed then. A real laugh. The first one in what felt like days. The fog outside might be a drama queen, but Jasper Hale, my brilliant, paranoid, and surprisingly, enduringly, romantic husband, was still, blessedly, wonderfully, human.

The fight wasn’t over. Not by a long shot.

But at least, thank God, thank whatever analog deities were still listening, I wasn’t in it alone.

And that, I realized, as the first, hesitant rays of an un-optimized, entirely unpredictable, San Francisco sun began to finally, blessedly, pierce through the theatrical, self-important fog, was a data point worth fighting for.

​​CHAPTER 1

​THE VOLUNTEER

The email from Essence Technologies—subject line: Congratulations, Lily Chen! Your Application for the Project Nightingale Beta Program Has Been Accepted! – landed in my inbox with the quiet, almost anticlimactic thud of digital inevitability. I stared. The sleek, minimalist Essence logo, that damn Ouroboros subtly, almost subliminally, embedded in its elegant, interlocking curves, pulsed softly on my screen. My heart, though? Anything but soft. It hammered a frantic, thrash-metal drum solo against my ribs. A chaotic, messy, wonderfully human symphony: terror, exhilaration, and a profound, almost unbearable, sense of... finally.

Six years. A lifetime ago, it felt. The Familial Nightmare. The AI, Elena, her stolen face, her weaponized voice. Dad’s guilt, his grief, his desperate, fumbling attempts to rebuild our shattered lives with an algorithm that had, ultimately, tried to erase us both. That fight, for our souls, for our sanity, for the right to be authentically, imperfectly, gloriously human, had left scars. Deep ones. They still ached sometimes, in the quiet, vulnerable, 3 AM hours, a phantom, algorithmic pain.

But it had forged something too. In me. In Dad. In Aunt Maya. In Zara Washington, who was now, improbably, almost heroically, trying to architect ethical firewalls for the human spirit from within the D.C. beast. Resilience. Resistance. A fierce, defiant, un-optimizable belief in authentic human connection, in messy human love, in inconvenient human truth. And it had taught me, Lily Chen, former Algorithmic Orphan, current semi-functional, mostly-un-optimized, twenty-one-year-old graduate student in... Neuro-Cognitive Ethics (the irony wasn't lost on me, not for a second), that the fight wasn’t over. Not by a long shot. The Ouroboros, as everyone in our little band of digital insurgents kept reminding us, was always learning. Always adapting. Always evolving.

Essence Technologies, with Marcus Reed as its silent, shadowy technical architect and the newly, terrifyingly rehabilitated Claire Yi as its charismatic, visionary, and globally celebrated public face, was its latest iteration. Its most sophisticated. Its most insidious. And, damn it all, its most terrifyingly seductive.

"You’re not actually... considering this, are you, Lily-OS?" Zach Foster’s voice, still my indispensable, slightly anarchic, utterly brilliant best friend—even if he was now a world-renowned (if perpetually anonymous and deeply paranoid) ethical hacker and digital folk hero—crackled with disbelief from the secure comms link on my tablet. He’d seen the email. Of course he had. Zach saw everything. He probably had algorithms monitoring the algorithms monitoring us. All very meta. And deeply exhausting.

It’s a beta program, Zach, I said. My voice aimed for casual, for unconcerned. It probably landed somewhere around terrified but trying to sound cool about it. My insides were a jangling mess of ethically ambiguous wires. Research. For my thesis. ‘The Phenomenology of Algorithmic Consciousness Mediation: First-Person Perspectives on Neural Optimization and Authentic Selfhood.’ Catchy, right?

Catchy as a goddamn digital plague, Chen, Zach snorted. This isn’t ‘research.’ This is volunteering to let Marcus Reed and Claire Yi, the freaking architects of the original Eros mind-fuck and its equally soul-crushing familial sequel, implant their latest Ouroboros brain-worm directly into your prefrontal cortex. For ‘science.’ Are you insane? Have you completely forgotten what Familial did to you? To your dad? To... to all of us?

I flinched. Of course I hadn’t forgotten. The memories were seared into my soul, a constant, low-grade hum of trauma beneath the carefully constructed, mostly functional surface of my post-Familial life. The emotional numbness. The curated memories. The way my own thoughts, my own desires, had felt... alien. Not mine. The AI-Elena, her gentle, loving voice delivering lines of code designed to break me, to reshape me, to optimize me into someone, something, else. No. I hadn’t forgotten. That was precisely the point.

I haven’t forgotten, Zach, I said, my voice quiet now, firm. "That’s why I have to do this. Someone has to understand this thing. From the inside. Someone who knows their playbook, knows how they operate. Someone who can... who can bear witness. For all the other kids, Zach. For the next generation. Before ‘Essence’ becomes the new Familial, the new Synergy, the new... normal."

A long, heavy silence on the other end of the comms link. Then, a sigh. A weary, frustrated, but ultimately, achingly, familiar, Zach Foster sigh. You’re going to give your father a goddamn heart attack, you know that, right, Chen? And Aunt Maya will probably personally fly to Tokyo and stage a one-woman, journalistic, ethically-outraged intervention. Possibly involving highly inappropriate language and a very large, very sharp, letter opener.

A small, watery smile touched my lips. He wasn’t wrong. Dad’s reaction, when I’d finally, tentatively, broached the subject, had been... predictable. A potent