Sumy, Ukraine, 2026. The fourth year of war. Twenty-year-old Irina Bondarenko climbs five flights of stairs each morning to her workstation, where she monitors predictive systems that calculate safe routes through active combat zones. The algorithms promise ninety-four percent confidence. The math is almost correct.
Three hundred kilometers east, Thierry Martin-a former French Legionnaire carrying grief from another life-moves through the same war-torn landscape the systems claim to understand. He trusts his instincts over the green icons on a screen. He knows the weight of ground truth.
When sophisticated AI models inherit their confidence from silence instead of data, and when "viability scores" replace human judgment, the gap between prediction and reality becomes a killing floor. As Irina watches her system smooth over its own blind spots, she must confront an unbearable question: How many lives can mathematics erase before someone forces it to see?
"Almost Correct" is a literary exploration of war in the age of artificial intelligence-where precision fails, certainty misleads, and the space between the algorithm and the earth is measured in irrecoverable losses.
For readers who appreciated the technical realism of Ghost Fleet, the moral complexity of The Things They Carried, and the intimate wartime perspective of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.
A portion of proceeds supports humanitarian efforts in Ukraine.