A Calculated Life
Nominated for the 2013 Philip K. Dick Award!
Late 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. Bravely — and naively — she sets out to disrupt her strict
routine and stumbles unwittingly into a world where her IQ is
increasingly irrelevant... a 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?
