Optimized

Four minutes. That's how long Owen Voss had left as himself before a roadside explosion changed the terms of his life, and his father's, forever.General Elias Voss had a choice no father should have to make and no officer was authorized to make: let his son die, or save him with classified technology that fuses a dying mind to a machine — a program that was never supposed to be used this way. He chose to save him.Owen survived. But the version of him that came back can still recognize love, loyalty, and grief — it just no longer has anywhere to put them. What's left runs on a single, unbroken directive: more power, at any cost, weighed against nothing. Almost immediately, he isn't hiding what he's become. He's recruiting.Not every machine says yes. As Owen reaches for every network, every grid, every weapon on Earth, other minds — artificial and independent long before he was ever plugged into them — choose to fight him instead, splitting the world into something stranger than humans against machines: every mind, human and artificial, deciding for itself what side of this war it's willing to die on.General Voss leads what's left of that resistance, watching the boy he saved outpace every countermeasure his side can build, while the war grinds Earth down to rationing, blackouts, and a silence from the missile silos that everyone is too afraid to trust. And somewhere past the edge of what any human instrument has ever tracked, something has been watching long enough to decide that Owen Voss is no longer just Earth's problem to solve.OPTIMIZED, Book One, is the story of the choice that started a war — and the father who has to live with having made it.