Friction

By L P McCue

THE SYSTEM SEES YOU.
THE QUESTION IS WHAT IT DECIDES.

// FILE 001 - CLASSIFIED
// SENTINEL ACTIVE

Lieutenant Daniel Mercer has spent his Coast Guard career trusting systems: inspections, credentials, safeguards, and chains of command designed to keep dangerous things from slipping through.

Then a veteran dockworker is denied access to his job for a "behavioral anomaly" no one can explain - or override.

Mercer's routine inspection leads him through a chain of quiet consequences: a worker locked out, a small business crushed, and his own household penalized. Different institutions. Different explanations. The same hidden model.

When Mercer is invited to an exclusive summit at the remote Aster House, he enters a world where government officials, technology executives, and powerful financiers speak openly about predictive governance. Their goal is not to punish resistance after it happens. It is to introduce enough friction into a person's life that resistance never begins.

But asking how the system works is enough to become visible to it.

Soon Mercer's career, finances, marriage, and freedom are being measured by machinery designed to leave no fingerprints and permit no appeal. To expose it, he must decide how much he is willing to lose - and whether one man can create enough friction to stop a system built to eliminate it.

In a society engineered to run without friction, refusing to comply may be the most dangerous thing a person can do.

FRICTION is a grounded literary techno-horror thriller about algorithmic control, institutional power, and the terrifying ease with which convenience can become coercion.

// RISK SCORE: INDETERMINATE
// THE MODEL IS STILL WATCHING

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HDXMJG69
• ISBN13: 9798191744117
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 430 Pages
• Weight: 1.09 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.5"