Untitled 156: A Novel

From the author of the acclaimed The World Wasn’t Ready for You comes a thrilling first novel, set in a near future where artificial intelligence runs the world, involving a young medical student who must unravel family secrets to uncover the truth of his father’s mysterious death.

In a time not so far from our own, society is run by a global AI system controlled by an all powerful corporation. The Shepherd Organization oversees every medical school in the country save one in New Orleans, the renegade Hippocrates which still insists on human-led medicine. It is the last choice school for an ambitious young New Yorker named Pok. But after his father—himself a physician—dies under mysterious circumstance that seems connected to “the shepherds” and their megalomaniacal young CEO, Pok finds himself on a quest for answers that leads right to Hippocrates. Once enrolled, he stumbles upon a further mystery: a strange illness is plaguing newcomers to New Orleans who grew up under shepherd rule. What is causing this fatal anomaly?  And how does it relate to the mystery of Pok’s father’s death and his own mysterious past?

Justin C. Key is a practicing psychiatrist and a speculative fiction writer. He is the author of the debut novel The Hospital at the End of the World and the story collection The World Wasn’t Ready for You. His stories have appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Lightspeed, and on Tor.com. He received a BA in biology from Stanford University and completed his residency in psychiatry at UCLA. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.