The Curated Life

What if your entire life was perfectly curated—and you were the product?

In 2045, Maya Chen crafts flawless emotional experiences for billions of viewers as a Senior Optimization Analyst at Synthesis Entertainment Networks. Every story she creates is scientifically calibrated to deliver maximum satisfaction, every emotion precisely tuned to eliminate discomfort. It's the perfect job in a perfect world where human happiness has been optimized to perfection.

But perfection comes with a price.

When Maya begins experiencing dangerous cravings for unfiltered, authentic emotion, she discovers a hidden world of resistance fighters preserving fragments of genuine human experience. Led into the shadows by mysterious collector Elias Rothford and guided by her own awakening consciousness, Maya uncovers a conspiracy that reaches to the very foundations of her reality.

The deeper she digs, the more disturbing the truth becomes. Her memories may be fabricated. Her identity might be artificial. And the choice between comfortable lies and dangerous truth will determine not just her fate, but the future of human consciousness itself.

In a world where authentic emotion has become contraband, Maya must decide: Is the right to feel genuine pain worth sacrificing engineered happiness?

The Curated Life is a thought-provoking exploration of consciousness, authenticity, and resistance in an age where technology can perfect human experience—but at the cost of human truth. Perfect for readers who loved Black Mirror, Westworld, and The Matrix.

What happens when artificial intelligence learns to fight for authentic experience? The answer will challenge everything you think you know about consciousness, choice, and what it means to be genuinely human.

A standalone science fiction thriller about the last war that will ever matter—the battle for the right to be authentically, inconveniently, beautifully human.