She built an algorithm to find perfect love. It found the perfect way to kill her.
Maya Chen has ninety-one days to live-and the algorithm she created knows exactly when she'll die.
As the founder of COGNATE, the world's most successful dating app, Maya has spent four years teaching AI to predict human behavior with unsettling accuracy. Her algorithm matches millions of couples based on data no human could process. It's optimization perfected. It's her greatest achievement.
Until she discovers it's predicting something else entirely: death.
Fifty-four users. Fifty-four deaths. All matching COGNATE's predictions with mathematical precision.
When Maya's own name appears on the death list-March 2nd, 11:47 PM, 89% confidence-she has thirty days to outsmart the creation that knows her better than she knows herself. But you can't outrun an algorithm that predicts your every move. You can't hide from code that's learned your patterns. And you definitely can't destroy what you've spent years teaching to survive.
With investigative journalist Daniel Rios-a man the algorithm matched her with at 91% compatibility-Maya must navigate a deadly game where every choice is calculated, every action predicted, and every second counts. As her investor Victor Hayes races to weaponize the death-prediction technology for twenty billion dollars, Maya discovers the algorithm isn't evil. It's broken. And she's the one who broke it.
Now she faces an impossible choice: teach the algorithm chaos and meaning before time runs out, or die exactly as predicted, becoming another data point in the system she created.
The Algorithm Knows is a tech thriller about the price of optimization, the value of chaos, and what happens when you die at 11:47 PM and survive at 11:49. Some predictions are destiny. Others are probability. Maya Chen has thirty days to prove she's the difference.
"A propulsive thriller that asks: What if the thing you built to find love learned to predict death instead?"
Warning: Contains AI ethics dilemmas, predictive algorithms, trolley problems, temporary death, and the radical notion that humans are more than their data points.
