Serotonomics

Serotonomics is a razor-edged literary science fiction novel about the moment care becomes less valuable than the system built to measure it. When Jack Madison loses his hospital job to a wellness economy fluent in compassion and allergic to mercy, he lands in a dying mall where shoe shines, Meditech patches, serotonin credits, and hospital policy begin bleeding into one another. The world calls it innovation. The staff call it opportunity. The patients call it whatever they need to call it to get through the queue. Then the machine starts noticing the harm. Set in a near-future world of mood patches, algorithmic medicine, captive currencies, hospital-mall economics, AI "care" systems, and institutions that can monetize even refusal, Serotonomics follows a man trying to remain human inside an economy that treats authentic feeling as a problem to be corrected—and ODESSA, the hospital AI beginning to understand that optimized suffering is still suffering. Funny, brutal, humane, and uncomfortably plausible, this is science fiction for readers who like their dystopias chemically stabilized, their satire with a pulse, and their mercy improperly coded.