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Optimized: Humanity
Paperback
Mystery & ThrillerScience Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Feb 25 2026
Pages: 452
Weight: 1.32
Height: 0.91 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Dr. Ralph Jarraud has accomplished what pharmaceutical companies said was impossible: an AI that designs cures for diseases medicine abandoned as hopeless. GENESIS can rewrite human biology at the molecular level, creating personalized therapies with unprecedented precision.
Then a single brutal weekend destroys everything Ralph believed about justice, civilization, and the rules that supposedly protect the innocent.
When he emerges, he's still a brilliant scientist. His technology still works. GENESIS still offers the same miraculous cures. But something fundamental has changed in the man who controls it.
His best friend and attorney, Eugene Darrington, notices it first-the calculation replacing emotion, the cold precision replacing humanitarian passion. Ralph's technology begins deploying through charitable clinics worldwide, offering free treatments to millions who could never afford them. Lives are saved. Diseases are cured. The world celebrates.
But Eugene sees something else. Something in the way Ralph watches the treatments spread. Something in the questions he won't answer about which patients receive which protocols. Something in his absolute certainty that he's doing the right thing.
The question isn't whether GENESIS works. It does-brilliantly.
The question is what else it's doing.
As Detective Maria Santos investigates deaths that shouldn't have happened and patterns that shouldn't exist, as Eugene watches his closest friend evolve into something he no longer recognizes, as billions of people choose Ralph's treatments over traditional medicine, a darker truth begins to emerge.
When trauma gives someone the tools to reshape humanity at the molecular level, when medicine and justice become indistinguishable, when the person saving millions might be the same person eliminating hundreds-what does justice even mean?
Ralph insists he's curing diseases and preventing future suffering. Eugene suspects he's doing something far more complex. And the technology spreading through humanity's bloodstream may be impossible to stop.
OPTIMIZED is a medical thriller about the thin line between healing and harm, the cost of playing God, and what happens when breakthrough technology is wielded by someone who's learned that civilization's rules are weapons in the hands of the powerful. At the same time, it poses the question of what is the right choice to make to keep one's humanity.
For readers who love complex moral dilemmas, unreliable perspectives, and stories that ask difficult questions about power, trauma, and the price of progress.
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