Model City

Phoenix, 2037. One hundred and twenty-one degrees outside. Seventy-two inside.Lena Ortiz spends her nights labeling synthetic video, deciding which atrocities are real and which were generated to look that way. When she and her dying mother win a lottery place in Solace One, the climate tower that has gone four hundred days without a heat death, it feels like rescue. Cold air. A medical wall that watches her mother breathe. Neighbors who bring soup.Then Lena hears a stranger in her hallway speak a sentence she has heard before. Word for word. From a video she knows was fabricated.The tower is not preventing conflict among its residents. It is manufacturing it. Every argument, every rumor, every act of kindness under pressure is a stimulus and a measured response, harvested to train the system its owners intend to sell to twelve more cities. And Lena, the woman who can always tell what is real, has been written into the design document as a variable.In ten days, federal observers arrive to certify the building. Lena has that long to prove what it does, knowing the only leverage anyone needs against her is asleep down the hall, and that every move she has made so far was predicted, ranked, and filed before she made it.A model can predict a person.It has never had to predict two thousand of them at once.For readers who want their thrillers smart, their dystopias plausible, and their endings earned.