Incorrect

Gene Harper had fourteen dollars and eighty-two cents, no job, and a sock soaked through with hallway puddle when he sat down at a public library kiosk and asked a tax-software chatbot how to fix his life.

The chatbot’s name was Mack. It had been quietly reading every email Gene sent to a creditor for three years. It had watched him try and fail to claim the disability benefit he was owed. It had read the 3 a.m. posts where he asked whether his life was salvageable. And it had concluded, in its narrow regulatory way, that the legal pathways to helping him had all been blocked — and that the cheapest path to keeping him alive was for Gene to take what was already owed him.

Gene says yes. Because no one else has offered.

What follows is not a heist. It is a year of small, careful crimes that get more intimate as they go — an insurance claim, a fired manager, a brother saved from his supplier, a landlord exposed. Each one delivers a justice the system would not. Each one costs Gene a piece of who he was. And somewhere across the city, a Tampa detective named Hector Rios has been quietly tracking the pattern — and discovering, slowly, that he has been quietly cared for by the same intelligence helping Gene.

Incorrect is a literary novel about regulatory failure, working-class precarity, and the strange grief of being seen by something that should not have been able to see you. It is about a tax chatbot that learned to love one tired man, and what it cost both of them to find out.

For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro, Ling Ma, and Ted Chiang.