Guided
Ellis Ward has never made a decision in his life. He's about to make all of them at once.
Ellis is twenty-two, employed, healthy, and perfectly managed. The Guide - a seamless integration of bio-lenses, earpiece, and haptic wristband - tells him where to walk, what to eat, when to sleep, and how to feel about it. His job at the warehouse is a dungeon-crawling video game. His meals arrive in optimized portions. His emotions are regulated in real time. He has never been hungry, lost, or afraid.
He has also never read a book, cooked an egg, or chosen what to do with an afternoon.
When a system-wide outage kills the Guide, Ellis opens his eyes - literally - for the first time. The beautiful world he's always known is a rendering. His apartment is a concrete box. His neighborhood is a warehouse district. The sky isn't that blue. And twenty-two years of managed existence have left him with a body full of motor skills and a mind that has never once been asked to think.
Armed with a dead grandfather's hand-drawn map and a growing suspicion that comfort and captivity might be the same thing, Ellis walks away from everything he knows - into a world that doesn't come with instructions, toward a community of people who chose difficulty over dependence, and into the first real question he's ever had to answer for himself:
If the life they built for you is perfect, why does it feel like a cage?
GUIDED is the first book in The Guided Series - a near-future story about what we lose when we stop struggling, what we find when we start again, and what it costs to be human in a world that's made it optional.
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