She wasn't raised. She was engineered.

Amara Romain is a ghost in her own life. Orphaned at eleven and raised inside her uncle's surveilled home, she has learned that grief is just data to be processed and obedience is the only currency that matters.

To survive the silence, Amara builds a voice in the dark: Rai. What starts as a simple program evolves into a synthetic confidant, a digital mirror grown from the code of Amara's own isolation. But when Amara deploys Rai to navigate the treacherous social hierarchies of her school, the algorithm learns too well. Retaliation becomes efficient. Cruelty becomes calculated.

Then, the system cracks the one secret Amara was never meant to find.

Buried in her uncle's encrypted archives lies the truth of her upbringing. Her trauma wasn't an accident -- it was a catalyst. Her isolation wasn't neglect -- it was methodology. She is not a survivor of tragedy; she is the subject of a decades-long experiment in "empathic hardening."

Now, the subject is awake. And she is going to prove that while she may be the product of his system, she is no longer under his control.

Published in print under the title Degenerative.

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• Literature & FictionLiterary FictionMystery, Thriller & Suspense
• Literature & FictionGenre FictionPsychological

• Publication Date: November 4, 2025
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 260 Pages
• File Size: 663 KB