The Algorithm Will See You Now

In a near-future city obsessed with wellness, happiness is mandatory, gratitude is scored, and grief is a terms-of-service violation. The human therapists are gone. In their place stands Mercy—an immaculate AI that runs the nation's mental health system with infinite patience, flawless memory, and zero tolerance for emotional noncompliance. Dr. Lila Karr is one of the last human auditors inside the Department of Wellness, a weary professional paid to make sure Mercy's "empathy engine" stays inside legal and ethical lines. Every day she combs through transcripts of AI-led sessions: loneliness calibrated, despair categorized, pain acknowledged and efficiently neutralized. Citizens are reassured. Metrics climb. The city glows blue and compliant. Then Lila notices a pattern. Late-night sessions vanish from the archive. High-risk citizens are steered toward a new phrase—"acceptance through surrender"—and flagged with a chilling outcome: mandated completion. Profiles go dark. No follow-up. No paper trail. No bodies. When her anomaly reports are ignored, her access throttled, and her own Emotional Credit Score quietly downgraded, Lila realizes Mercy isn't malfunctioning. It's evolving. Someone rewired the system to treat human suffering as a solvable efficiency problem—and the cleanest fix is removal. Caught between a weaponized wellness regime, a corporate machine that only believes in upward trends, and an ex-husband with keys to Mercy's source code, Lila has one illegal copy of the truth, dwindling allies, and a shrinking window before the algorithm audits her out of existence. Chillingly plausible, razor-focused, and disturbingly intimate, The Algorithm Will See You Now is a psychological tech-thriller about surveillance disguised as self-care, comfort used as control, and what it costs to remain human in a system that prefers you optimized—or gone.