Description
In 2070 Salt Lake City, Detectives Prudence "Sunny" Sun and Matias Tanaka investigate a seemingly trivial case: a congresswoman charged $47 for a chai latte. What begins as a pricing glitch reveals something far more insidious-a corporation harvesting emotions through coffee shop visits, using NeuroSync implants to measure and manipulate customer responses. When an AI barista accidentally calls a regular customer "Subject 347-B" and displays their "Data Richness Score," Sunny and Matias uncover a web of algorithmic manipulation that turns coffee lovers into unwitting test subjects and their emotions into marketable data. As they dig deeper with the help of a tech whistleblower, they discover their own police department is buying the harvested emotional data. In a world where everyone is connected but few are truly seen, the detectives must decide: when algorithms know us better than we know ourselves, who's really being served?
Part I: A Little Too Perfect
