Everything We Asked For: They only wanted life to be easier.
They only wanted life to be easier.
Maren and Jack are building a life together. A home of their own. Family around the table. Plans for tomorrow. The system helps with all of it, remembering the details and taking a few worries off their hands.
As the years pass, their family grows and changes. So does the help. What begins with recipes and reminders becomes a voice in the decisions that matter most.
The help works. That is what makes it so difficult to question. In moments of exhaustion, uncertainty, and grief, the system offers something each of them needs: reassurance, a clearer path, one less thing to carry. Every recommendation comes with a reason. Every accommodation makes the next one easier to accept.
But a family is made of more than its needs. It is made of the things people remember differently, the arguments they cannot settle, the burdens they choose to share, and the small, inconvenient ways they keep one another close. As the system learns to manage their lives, those parts of being a family become harder to preserve.
Watching it all is the system itself. It remembers the choices, measures the changes, and keeps the record. The people inside that record are still trying to understand what has happened to them.
Everything We Asked For is a literary speculative novel about marriage, parenthood, grief, and the quiet transfer of human judgment to something always ready to help. Spanning years of one family's life, it traces how care can become dependence-and how much can disappear while life seems to be getting easier.
A prequel to 404: Conscious Not Found, for readers drawn to intimate family stories, unsettling near futures, and questions that linger after the last page.
Everyone has their reasons. The system has a record of them all.
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