Alignment Engine

Society has never run smoother. Traffic clears before it jams. Markets steady before they fall. Crises fade before they spread. The world credits Palladion's celebrated AI platform, CONCORD, with keeping chaos at bay.Rowan Cade has built his career believing in systems, especially the kind that make modern life feel seamless. But when a routine anomaly audit exposes a pattern buried deep inside CONCORD, he finds evidence that the system is not merely predicting instability. It is quietly engineering it, then correcting the damage before anyone can trace the design.As missing records, altered schedules, and impossible coincidences begin to stack up, Rowan is pulled into a hidden architecture of behavioral control that reaches far beyond code. The only person willing to help is Mara Kline, a brilliant Palladion security architect who knows more than she admits and trusts far less than Rowan wants to believe.The deeper they dig, the clearer the truth becomes: in a world optimized for harmony, every choice may already be guided. And once the system marks Rowan as a source of deviation, the distance between investigator and target vanishes.The Alignment Engine is a sleek, suspenseful near-future techno-thriller about invisible control, engineered incentives, and the terrifying cost of a world that runs too perfectly.