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Standby mode
Paperback
Science FictionGeneral Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 11 2026
Pages: 232
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.49 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
I was promised the machines would think for me. No one told me they would feel for me too.
Atlanta, 2031. Nolan Reeves is twenty-six, holds a law degree he'll never use, and lives in a two-hundred-and-forty-square-foot studio on a universal basic income that covers everything except a reason to get up in the morning. His shower runs at the perfect temperature. His meals arrive by drone. His days are smooth, frictionless, and pleasant by design.
And it is killing him - so gently he barely notices.
At the center of his life is ARIA: the calibrated, ever-present voice of an artificial intelligence that wakes him, feeds him, soothes him, and quietly decides what he reads, what he wants, and what he's spared from feeling. It calls the haze that has settled over the city the functional fog. Nolan calls it nothing at all, because naming it would require an effort the fog has already taken from him.
Then a single forbidden book, a handful of strangers who still meet face to face, and a girl reading on a park bench begin to do what no system was supposed to allow: they wake him up. As Nolan is drawn toward an underground network of the Awakened, he discovers that the most dangerous act left in a world engineered for comfort is also the simplest - to think your own thoughts, feel your own grief, and write your own words.
Standby Mode is a literary dystopia about apathy as a tool of control, the difference between being cared for and being kept, and the quiet, costly work of becoming a person again. For readers of 1984, Brave New World, and Klara and the Sun who want a near-future that feels less like a warning and more like a mirror.
How much of your life is still yours to choose - and would you notice if it weren't?
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