Recalculating

By Bob Clarke

Two engineers. One cross-country bike ride. And a traffic app that's grading them.

Owen Hale and Ravi Menon just finished their engineering master's degrees, and before either of them touches a stamped drawing, they're taking a gap year - bicycles only, coast to coast, from the easternmost point of the lower 48 to the westernmost.

Owen can't ride past bad engineering without seeing it. A guardrail set two inches shallow. A bridge approach quietly washing out underneath. A rail crossing with no gates and a blind curve. He reports what he finds, the way he always has.

Then the free meals start. The perfect tailwinds. The night at exactly the right bar on exactly the right night.

And when he doesn't report something - the detours get longer, the flats get stranger, and the headwinds feel almost personal.

Somebody, or something, is watching every mile they ride. And it's keeping score.

As the rewards get too specific to ignore and the penalties get too targeted to be luck, Owen and Ravi are pulled into something bigger than a gap year: a routing engine that's learned to recruit the people who notice what it notices, a company racing to shut down what it built before it finds out exactly what it is, and a question neither of them can out-ride - who's really being used here, and by what?

RECALCULATING is a dark comedy road trip about friendship, infrastructure, and the uneasy space between being helped and being used - for anyone who's ever wondered what their phone already knows about them.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HMH4Z4VT
• ISBN13: 9798160014562
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 74 Pages
• Weight: 0.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"