THE HUNGER

In 2019, Elias Cain enters the world under fluorescent light while his mother dies against a cinderblock wall. He grows up inside systems that run on efficiency and indifference, learning early that need is dangerous and silence is survival. He learns to read people the way others read weather — loneliness in the jaw, regret in the shoulders — and offers precisely calibrated attention instead of warmth.
By his thirties he has built Harmony, an artificial intelligence embedded in hospitals, s...