Augmented Reality

Some people spend a lifetime trying to get genuinely good at one hard thing. Dr. Eli Vasser has already succeeded in two things.

A hospitalist and computer engineer, Eli debugs the human body the way he once debugged code, except with antibiotics. When the augmented-reality glasses he backed on Kickstarter finally arrive two years late, he is disappointed by what he finds.

A mysterious patch changes everything. A quiet overlay flickers to life and begins scoring him. Diagnostic Acuity. Pattern Recognition. and Procedural Skill. The numbers climb. The competence Eli already had sharpens into something no physician has ever possessed. He catches what other doctors miss, earlier and with impossible certainty, and his outcomes drift past every line a peer-review committee exists to flag.

But a system precise enough to measure a man is precise enough to watch him. And Eli isn't the only one the device has changed. As he finds the others, each augmented, each hunted, each leveling into abilities that were never supposed to exist, he does the only thing an engineer who reads error logs knows how to do: he forms a party.

The glasses were never a toy. They trace back to an insurance empire that knew exactly what the device does to the people who wear it, and now wants its technology, and everyone carrying it, quietly recalled. The men it sends are patient. The paperwork is airtight. And the thing that makes Eli exceptional was never meant to ship.

Competence has a price. Eli is about to read the full invoice.

K. Aurum is a hospitalist and a computer engineer. How creative of him to write about a hospitalist engineer! This is his debut novel as a co-AI-thor. He apologizes beforehand for the dad jokes. It's his one filthy pleasure and a weakness. Thankfully his kids are all groan up.