Calculated Life

Finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award and the Kitschies Golden Tentacle (Debut Novel) AwardLate in the twenty-first century, big business is booming and state institutions are thriving thanks to advances in genetic engineering, which have produced a compliant population free of addictions. Violent crime is a rarity.Hyper-intelligent Jayna is a star performer at top predictive agency Mayhew McCline, where she forecasts economic and social trends. A brilliant mathematical modeler, she far outshines her co-workers, often correcting their work on the quiet. Her latest coup: finding a link between northeasterly winds and violent crime.When a string of events contradicts her forecasts, Jayna suspects she needs more data and better intuition. She needs direct interactions with the rest of society. Bravelyand naivelyshe sets out to disrupt her strict routine and stumbles unwittingly into a world where her IQ is increasingly irrelevanta place where human relationships and the complexity of life are difficult for her to decode. And as she experiments with taking risks, she crosses the line into corporate intrigue and disloyalty.Can Jayna confront the question of what it means to live a normal life? Or has the possibility of a normal life already been eclipsed for everyone?