Meet Jordan Reese
Efficiency score: 97
Everything else: complicated...
Jordan Reese spent years believing in the system. Senior Innovation Facilitator. Efficiency score: Falcon tier. A loyal architect of a world engineered to leave nothing to chance. She didn't just work for the JNA. She believed in what it was building. Order, purpose, the elimination of waste. A society where every resource, every relationship, every hour of the day was pointed at something useful.
Then she found what the algorithm couldn't account for.
And the system noticed.
The Algo explores what happens when optimization becomes the instrument of control. When the tools we build to help us live better are quietly turned against the things that make life worth living: creativity, uncertainty, the stubborn refusal to be predictable.
In Denver 2045, citizens wear wristbands that track efficiency in real time. Relationships are algorithm-matched. Art has been classified as a resource drain. The Falcon tier is where Jordan lives. Below her, citizens who score too low face Resource Reclamation. Above her, the architects of the system who know exactly what it costs.
Are You Ready to See Beyond?
This is not a novel about a regime that rose to power through violence. It rose through a crisis. Through fear, and data, and the seductive logic that if something can be measured, it should be. The scariest part isn't what the JNA does. It's how reasonable it sounds.
CJ Arlow's debut novel asks one question that gets harder to answer the further you read: what happens to a person when the system they built their life around turns out to be built on something else entirely?