Charlee Dyroff

In a near-future America where loneliness has supposedly been eliminated from society’s vocabulary, Lee expects her academic success to secure her a prestigious job at a leading technology corporation. Instead, she finds herself in a struggling, half-abandoned New York City, working for an obscure company with an unusual mission: training an artificial intelligence named Vicky to understand friendship. Initially, Lee approaches the task as a research problem, studying human interactions and observing the lively social life of her roommate, Veronika. But when she discovers that her employer is part of a secret government project designed to combat a mysterious resurgence of loneliness, her ambition takes over. Determined to produce results, Lee begins pursuing increasingly risky experiences to teach the algorithm what genuine human connection looks like. As her research becomes entangled with her own emotional life, she must confront the limits of technology and her understanding of intimacy. With wit and unsettling imagination, Dyroff explores isolation, ambition and the human need to belong in an increasingly technology-driven world.