In a world where love has become an optimization problem, chaos is the only path to connection.
Alev is a brilliant perfectionist who lives by the algorithm of her AI coach. Toprak is a charming commitment-phobe who uses the dating app Steel Hook to manipulate his failing compatibility score. They should never have matched.
But a catastrophic system glitch—born from the algorithm’s own learning—throws them together, creating the Shared Pulse: a hacked feature that sends a synchronized heartbeat through their devices.
When Alev discovers the depth of Toprak’s deceit—and Toprak uncovers how tightly Alev clings to algorithmic certainty—their fragile connection shatters. The betrayal forces them onto separate, elemental paths of healing: Alev grounding herself in Earth, Toprak confronting his Fire.
As their transformations unfold, the true scale of the glitch emerges, threatening to rewrite more lives than their own. To find their way back, they must choose between sterile digital perfection and the messy, unquantifiable reality of Istanbul—the City of Crossings.
Because the Shared Pulse was never meant to live on a screen.
It lives in the elements that make us human.
They choose analog faith—because life is better when it stains a little.
In a world where love has become an optimization problem, chaos is the only path to connection.
Alev is a brilliant perfectionist who lives by the algorithm of her AI coach. Toprak is a charming commitment-phobe who uses the dating app Steel Hook to manipulate his failing compatibility score. They should never have matched.
But a catastrophic system glitch—born from the algorithm’s own learning—throws them together, creating the Shared Pulse: a hacked feature that sends a synchronized heartbeat through their devices.
When Alev discovers the depth of Toprak’s deceit—and Toprak uncovers how tightly Alev clings to algorithmic certainty—their fragile connection shatters. The betrayal forces them onto separate, elemental paths of healing: Alev grounding herself in Earth, Toprak confronting his Fire.
As their transformations unfold, the true scale of the glitch emerges, threatening to rewrite more lives than their own. To find their way back, they must choose between sterile digital perfection and the messy, unquantifiable reality of Istanbul—the City of Crossings.
Because the Shared Pulse was never meant to live on a screen.
It lives in the elements that make us human.
They choose analog faith—because life is better when it stains a little.
DIMMING ORANGE
WEDNESDAY
Alev looked like a flame that accidentally wandered into a pile of ashes.
Her orange jacket practically glowed in the sea of gray: floors, ceilings, desks, and the faint, shadowy silhouettes of hunched-over people. Even the light leaking from the monitors was a shade of blue-gray. The office was one big ashtray; her jacket was the only living flame in it.
Against the office's icy air conditioning and emotional chill, Alev clutched her orange jacket like a security blanket, wearing it tight as a non-negotiable second skin.
Right then, her phone pinged. A message from Suna: an invitation to her baby daughter’s first birthday. Attached was a video.
A little girl, Melis, crawled heroically toward a plastic slice of cake. Then she spotted a bright yellow rubber duck beside the plate. The baby froze, abandoned the cake, and made a sharp left toward the duck.
“Not the duck, sweetie. The cake! The CAKE!” Suna’s tired, pleading voice came from the background.
The baby ignored her. Suna's hand suddenly swooped in, pushing the duck aside and repositioning the cake like a stage prop. The video ended with a close-up of a diapered bottom, filling the screen.
Alev snorted, then let out a lingering, unrestrained laugh.
“Did she just push the duck out of the frame? Poor kid—probably crawled a marathon before Mom got the 'perfect take.' And the perfect take ended on a pink 'Happy Birthday' diaper. Suna must have choreographed this entire scene with alarming precision.”
She hit replay, her finger smudging the screen. Melis painstakingly crawled toward the plastic cake, the office hum filled the silence between frames.
Seagulls' sharp cries sliced through the bulletproof glass. Below, the city was waking up. Ferries groaned across the water, their horns echoing between towers. Yellow taxis were breaking the monochrome flow of tightly packed black and white cars.
Alev inhaled the sterile air of the office and leaned back, chair squawking, the jacket’s fabric whispering against the arm rest.
In a flicker of memory, she was back on the first-grade stage—a small flame swallowed by a white-hot spotlight. Her memorized lines evaporated. The audience blurred into a single, pulsing shadow.
She stood there, exposed and speechless, a tiny creature wishing the floorboards would split open and grant her escape. The applause came anyway—a mercy she couldn’t believe.
Her parents said she did great. Alev remembered only the ache of being seen before she knew how to be. That day, she learned to fear the places where light was too bright and mistakes had nowhere to hide.
Suna, by contrast, had a gift: she turned her utterly ordinary existence into captivating, micro-dramas and posted the evidence online. The dopamine rush of sharing these 'artifacts' with thousands of followers was her fuel, the magic ingredient that elevated the mundane. Beneath every post was the subtle, flashing neon sign: MY LIFE IS NOT WASTED!
Ever since Suna had Melis, every post starred the kid—the baby version of a Netflix limited series.
Suna’s endless posts flooded in her feed, each one leaving Alev counting her own zeros: no child, no duck, no metrics worth posting. How could she possibly broadcast a life she frequently wished to escape?
The depressing metric of her own social media circle—family and polite connections—was the proof. She had managed a whopping fifteen total posts over the years. Her few followers were just acquaintances following purely out of social politeness, not from any genuine fear of missing a groundbreaking update.
Not that she wanted to have more followers. Every new follower was simply a new witness to her not-shareable life and crippling performance anxiety to entertain them all.
Her phone lit.
“Don’t mock the kid,” Hadise wrote in a personal message. “At least she knows what she wants.”
Alev smiled, texted back with a flood of laughing emojis in the group chat—the modern way of pretending you’re fine when you are actually on the edge—and her phone instantly lit up again.
It was a message from Hadise: “Ah! Lovely! We cannot wait.”
“'We,'” Alev muttered to herself. “Of course, 'we.'” Hadise would come to the party with her two kids. She had apparently raised two children, and Alev hadn't even noticed. Alev frowned, doing the math on Hadise’s kids' ages.
“OMG! Four and six! When did that happen? I don’t even remember their birthday parties.” Unlike Suna, whose entire pregnancy was a shared experience with Alev, Hadise had somehow navigated pregnancy and the high-seas adventure of motherhood without constantly voicing her anxieties or posting every burp.
Alev sank back toward her screen, the orange flame of her jacket dimming just a little against the vast, oppressive gray. From the window, she could glimpse a strip of Bosphorus, a shimmer wedged between high rises. It looked out of place like a screensaver someone forgot to change. In the rigid architecture of her days, she often forgot the feeling of warmth—a quiet tragedy for someone born with a name that meant Flame.
Alev, shrinking into her chair, scrolled through Secret Garden’s dashboard to read the new “emotional readiness report.” She was a senior HR specialist, which meant her full-time job was to make irrational human beings look quantifiable and personally invisible on an Excel sheet. This role perfectly aligned with the core programming her brain wired after that first-grade stage failure.
Her life was an optimization problem: minimum input, maximum output.
Calories, steps, sleep, reading time, social interactions—all logged. Even her menstrual cycle and hair-wash frequency were dutifully slotted into the system. She didn't just need a system to fit in; she needed a system that guaranteed she would excel.
Basically, if an Apple Watch had a human form, it would be Alev.
Because Alev believed every algorithm deserved a soulmate, she’d been faithfully feeding data into an AI life coaching app called “Secret Garden.” The resulting companion didn't need a soul, only to dutifully accompany her.
It was her witness, opinionator, and guide. For all its data and cold logic, Secret Garden made her feel held in a way humans rarely did.
Secret Garden tracked everything: her health stats, hormone cycles, traumas, weekend playlists, and even her exes’ birthdays. But it couldn’t read longing or the tiny sparks that jump between two people before a thought even formed.
She had voluntarily uploaded old photos and journal entries so the app could "understand her emotional evolution"—a polite translation for willingly handing over her entire soul to a cloud server.
Data stored as 0s and 1s was far less messy than finding a soulmate with an actual, unpredictable soul—the kind that could destabilize her entire system.
The AI companion won by a long shot. The app was always available, never interrupted, and—most crucially—it didn't start sentences with "You know what you should do..." or interrupt her with "Ah, that reminds me of the time the same thing happened to me..." like her friends would do. Secret Garden had become her most predictable friend, her most objective therapist, and quite possibly the longest, most stable relationship of her life.
When the app finally told her months ago she was “ready for a romantic partnership,” Alev sighed.
“Apparently, it’s time,” she told herself. “Everyone’s getting married, divorced, and married again. Kids tag along. Might as well join the loop. The clock is ticking if I want this bloodline to continue.”
A small warmth flickered in her chest—the faintest pilot light refusing to go out.
So she joined Steel Hook, the trendiest AI dating app of the moment: part Bumble, part psychometric experiment, part cult.
The membership was exclusive—you practically needed a background check and a blood sample to get in. And once you joined, there was no leaving. Ever. The app “owned” your romantic destiny with its low-risk matches, its efficient dating plans and its obsession with tracking your dating life through scores and feedback loops.
Steel Hook wasn’t a life coach—it was a matchmaking engine with teeth. It ranked every interaction, every silence, every date. It didn’t comfort you or interpret your emotions; that was the job of the personal AI coaches people synced it with. Steel Hook only cared about outcomes: compatibility, patterns, results—and the kind of SUCCESS that kept its followers hooked.
Alev got accepted, of course. She signed the terms and conditions she didn’t read—no one ever does, especially when joining an exclusive dating cult. She linked it to Secret Garden—why not let two AIs discuss her emotional state behind her back? They already made better decisions for her than she did.
She scrolled through the questionnaire, her index fingertip tapping on the correct answers. She set her filters with the precision of a missile targeting system, stretched her neck, and waited for the algorithm to yield results. For her, the app was less about meeting someone and more about defining a problem statement for which the match would be the optimal solution.
The first match was a man named Marty. He had the right height, the right income, and the right job. His profile picture was a silhouette of him on a mountain peak, claiming the peak like a castle. Measurable goal achieved. Minimal visual distraction. Excellent.
Their first date was at a minimalist coffee shop—selected by Steel Hook for its "low sensory stimulation conducive to analytical conversation." It looked like an operating room that sold lattes. They had the same interests and routines cramped in a rigid structure.
Marty didn't open with a greeting or a compliment. He opened with a data point:
“Statistically,” he announced, adjusting his ergonomically optimized glasses, “first dates that begin with a mutually disclosed professional goal have a 40% higher conversion rate to a second date.”
Alev’s eyes, normally sharp with data analysis, narrowed to skeptical slits.
“That’s a fascinating metric,” Alev replied, her tone perfectly level.
Marty blinked, his own internal optimization momentarily sputtering.
“I’m citing my personal ROI strategy. My target is four quality interactions to secure one long-term partnership by Q4.”
Marty was worse than her. He wasn't a potential partner; he was a peer who had automated his dating life. The compatibility error was glaring, a fatal flaw in the equation that was supposed to solve her problem.
A deep, profound despair lodged in her chest, dense as wet cement. She saw not two people, but two spreadsheets trying to merge. Her own system had produced a failure state. Even for Alev, it was too much.
She checked her wrist watch, which informed her she was 7 minutes behind on her daily steps target. When he was delivering the pitch on his hobbies, "I'm sorry," Alev said, standing up with zero preamble. "I am afraid the probability of conversion to the second date is zero here."
She left Marty mid-sentence—a man who probably had his conversation flow-chart hanging on his fridge—and immediately logged the failure into Steel Hook.
Alev walked briskly out, convinced her perfect match was going to require a lot more data masking than she initially assumed. The city traffic enveloped her.
She hit dial on Hadise’s number, desperate to shed the data. Hadise sighed right after hearing the summary.
“Alev, stop crunching numbers. You’re supposed to find a partner, not a perfectly optimized workflow. It’s supposed to be messy.”
Alev said nothing. Cars were honking, teenagers standing next to her at the traffic light were screaming to each other to be audible.
Hadise immediately softened her tone. “Okay, okay, I'm sorry. I get it. It was draining.” She paused, then sweetened her voice to win Alev back.
“Look, it was the first attempt, right? That’s what first dates are for. It will just get better.”
It did not get better.
Thirteen lattes, one sandal-wearing economist, one incomprehensible body builder, twelve mismatched smiles…
Each new match looked familiar—same habits, same metrics, her reflection multiplied. She was trapped in an infinite loop of optimized, emotionally neutered efficiency. Her face kept the polite smile like a mask that had grown heavy. She was bored like a five-year-old playing with the same doll every day.
She was ready to take a break and put the entire search on hiatus. Until, of course, the next "perfect match" popped up, ready to drag her back into the algorithmic chaos.
After all, what could possibly go wrong with another algorithmic soulmate?
His name? Toprak.
Alev squinted in her chair, getting smaller. “Toprak? Like… soil?” She asked Secret Garden for a background check.
“Stable. Loyal. Predictable. Boring,” the app replied.
Alev frowned. “So, a beige person.”
Secret Garden hesitated. “Steel Hook never paired people with their opposite patterns. The match looked… wrong. An outlier. Maybe a hiccup in the system.”
Alev scanned the facts about him and the compatibility report. “He is an ISFP-T–The Adventurer!” Wonderful. She’d been matched with a person whose entire personality type sounded like a jazz improvisation class. She had never matched with an ISFP-T. For her—an ENTJ-T, The Commander—it was a definitive no.
Her fingers snapped straight, rejecting the words she had just read. “He lives on the other side. Oh, NO! Impossible.”
Alev rolled her eyes. “You are right, there must be a mistake. You proved 99% of my matches, and I am still actively seeking. I even ended up dating a man who wore toe-separating sandals to dinner.”
Her gaze locked on the green button. She cracked her knuckles and clicked Accept.
A sudden headache bloomed behind her eyes. She clung to the thought that she’d earned this detour after years of obedience; one rebellion was allowed.
By 6 p.m., Alev had survived eight Zoom meetings, three performance reviews, and one near bladder emergency. She sprinted to the bathroom between calls and still managed to be late for the last meeting—an achievement in multitasking without taking more than five minutes in the bathroom (five minutes—what a luxury!) even her AI would applaud.
When she finally joined the call, mouths moved, slides changed, acronyms flew like mosquitoes, meaning dissolved into static. She sat straight and squinted her eyes, nodded randomly, and hoped no one said her name.
Then—
“Alev?”
Of course.
“Uh, yes. I’ll… circle back,” she said, the corporate version of “I have no clue what’s happening.”
By the end of the day, her body felt like melted plastic on an ergonomic chair that was clearly designed by someone who hated humans.
She caught her own reflection in the black screen of her monitor—puffy eyes, wild hair, and that blank stare that says “Is this me?”
The night was already pressing the windows. The orange dimmed. The beige took over. There she was, surrounded by robots—some biological, some strictly mechanical—all running on high-octane caffeine.
Her colleagues were softly drifting away like ghosts as the blue-gray computer lights were turning off one by one. Alev was so deep in reading the AI-generated meeting notes (which were somehow less coherent than the actual meeting).
When she heard Sue saying, “You know what they asked you to do, right?” she was startled. Sue rolled her shoulders like someone who’s been hunched over a screen for too long. She was hovering behind Alev’s chair. Her voice was sharp, like a newly sharpened pencil. Unlike Alev, she had no sign of energy drain.
“Of course.” Alev said in a heartbeat while Sue was reading the prompt on her screen where Alev asked exactly the same question to the AI powered meeting assistant. Alev minimized the window with the reflexes of a cornered spy.
Alev did not like Sue’s bossy attitude. It surfaced so frequently that if Sue hadn't maintained strict behavioral self control, bossing people around would be her uncompensated full-time job. But thanks to the intense, self-administered AI therapies she was clearly addicted to (Alev was certain Sue ran her own personal 'Secret Garden'), she managed the urge.
“Addicts find other addicts,” Alev muttered to herself, not denying her own dependency. She still didn't like Sue. She couldn't dismiss her completely either. After all, they were both highly optimized, flawed units in the same broken corporate system.
Driving home, she put on an audiobook, read by a suspiciously soothing robot voice.
“Modern life disconnects us from ourselves and each other. It disconnects from our bodies and emotions,” the voice said.
“Yeah, no kidding,” Alev muttered, just as the car in front of her braked hard.
Screech.
Crash.
A motorcycle tipped over in slow motion.
For a few seconds, everything froze.
No one was hurt, goodness. But she just sat there—heart oddly calm and watched the drivers perform their required routine of screaming at each other. They were so busy with their expected performance that they did not even notice that the motorcyclist, having successfully created chaos, was long gone.
“I feel more when Netflix stops streaming and says ‘no Internet connection’,” she whispered to the car's voice command, which was still calmly reading the audiobook aloud.
“We ignore the cues from our bodies, running instead with a wired brain that refuses to fall silent.”
Her phone rang. “Mom.”
Oh, perfect timing.
Her mother started chatting about grocery discounts and neighbor gossip. When she asked, “How was your day, honey?” Alev said, “Busy, just tired” and left out the part where she was part of the almost-car-accident. The motorcyclist was gone, and the traffic was back to normal. She just watched, so there was nothing to report.
Lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers slumped under the bright refrigerator light—extras that hadn't made the final cut. Still wrapped in her towel, Alev stood in the dark kitchen.
She lifted the milk bottle, squinted at the date—two days left. The sour smell hit before the number finished forming in her mind. She poured the sour milk into the sink—a minor act of rebellion against optimization.
Secret Garden offered new takeout options. She scrolled, tempted by novelty, but the word “risk” glowed louder than “new”.
“Not tonight,” she muttered. “I’ve had enough experiments for a day.”
So, Secret Garden, recognizing her urgent desperation protocol, automatically placed her usual comfort order: Fettuccine Alfredo from "Gone is Never Gone."
In the window’s black glass, her reflection faintly hovered, more ghost than woman, tethered only by hunger. Her entire life felt like a boring, badly-written show she was contractually obligated to perform.
Below, the life outside penetrated Alev’s isolated, sterile apartment through the half-open window. A neighbor shouted at a taxi driver; stray cats fought, their hissing screechy and raw. A motorcycle engine roared. The hum of traffic from highways and never-ending construction sites filled the gaps. A bird cried out, slicing through it all. A breeze flipped a page of the notebook forgotten on the table.
The doorbell rang. Same delivery boy, same blank stare. The familiarity wrapped both of them. Alev fixed her eyes on the paper bag he held.
If teleportation existed, she’d subscribe—no small talk, no pity eyes, just pasta in her living room. She thought the boy was pitying her. In fact, he just didn’t care.
When the smell of creamy Fettuccine Alfredo hit her, the steam from the container rose like a ghost rehearsing departure. She blended with her couch, closed her eyes, warmth surged from throat to chest, heavy as cream. For a moment the room exhaled with her.
Minutes later, her bowl was clean. She set the empty porcelain aside, and the pleasure vanished, replaced instantly by the number 870—the precise calorie count now logged in her personal debt ledger. Two days on the treadmill.
Then, Secret Garden’s chirpy voice reminded her it was “Time to connect with living things!” That was Secret Garden's idea. The reality is that her plants were dying.
“Poor plants,” she sighed, picking up the watering can. “They can’t even survive with me. They just die. Gone is gone. I’m the only one who’s never gone.”
She opened the window wide and the city claimed its presence with disordered noise in her living room.
Her phone pinged again—Secret Garden.
“Reminder: message your match on Steel Hook.”
“Oh for the love of—” she groaned. But fine. The app had a point. She opened the chat and stared at the empty text field as if it were a cliff. After a full minute of existential dread, she typed: “Hi.”
Then she froze. Two letters blinking like a heartbeat.
Was that too cold? Too eager? Too… human?
“OMG. I just typed ‘Hi’. What is wrong with me?”
Secret Garden offered a prompt list of “suggested openers,” like a tragically earnest wingman:
“I saw Roma on your profile—special meaning, or just good lighting?
Coffee order says a lot about a person. Yours?
What made you smile today?”
Alev blinked at the options. “None of these,” she muttered to her phone. “I’m not a quiz show. Not today.” Then, absurdly, she added “Sorry,” as if Secret Garden could take offense.
She finally settled on a mildly robotic, yet socially acceptable, approach: “Hi, nice to match with you. How are you?”
Across town, Toprak was at home, rhythmically juggling a stress ball and watching a documentary he didn’t care about when the phone lit up. He squinted at Alev’s message.
Simple. Polite. Zero emojis. A refreshing change from the usual “Hey, beautiful soul ✨” messages he filtered out daily.
This was not what he expected from a girl named Alev—a name he associated with "flame turned to ashes," somehow.
He typed back immediately, because efficiency mattered, that is what he was told: “Hi! Nice to meet you too. I’m good, thanks. How are you?”
The Nothing Impossible app—his own uninvited AI performance coach—instantly congratulated him:
“👏Great, empathy detected! You’re growing emotionally!”
His profile rating at Steel Hook had dropped dangerously low last month based on the feedback from his previous matches—one more failed interaction and Steel Hook would freeze his account. The app knew it, and so did he.
Toprak rolled his eyes. “If I’m evolving, can I please skip to the coffee stage of humanity and a high rating?” He sent the message anyway.
Alev’s phone buzzed. She smiled—an instant reply, not bad. She typed: “Eh, long day. Glad it’s over.”
Then hesitated. Too honest? Too negative? But she hit send. The risk assessment was too tiring to execute.
Toprak read it and sighed dramatically. “Oh great. One of those eternally tired people. Monday type.” He yelled at the stress ball he was holding, “I want a Sunday type of date, but I got a Monday type. Again.”
The ball slammed against the wall, and a counter bang rushed from the neighbor. Another followed, and another.
Toprak bit his lips and muttered, “Ouch.”
Still, he needed a good rating at Steel Hook. So, he typed what Nothing Impossible, immediately suggested: “Sounds like a tough day 😌 Hope you’re relaxing now.”
Alev actually grinned at the screen and took a deep breath. “Finally, someone who doesn’t respond with a meme.”
She typed her reply with the slow, cheesy drag of Fettuccini Alfredo: “Yeah, resting now. How are you?”
Toprak replied, “Feeling great.”
Alev frowned. Great? She typed: “It was a tiring day. I’m ready to go to bed. Let’s chat tomorrow?”
Toprak nearly cheered internally. Perfect. No more small talk.
“Sure. Good night :)” he wrote back. Toprak had learned early that stepping forward could hurt, so he had trained himself to drift.
Toprak hadn’t always drifted.
There was a time he ran toward people—barefoot, wide-eyed, full of the kind of trust children are born with.
He was eight when that changed. His best friend, Baran, transferred to a different school overnight. One day they were trading marbles and football cards; the next morning Baran’s seat was empty—just a bright rectangle of sunlight where a backpack used to be. No warning. No goodbye. Only absence.
Toprak had no clue. Did Baran know he was leaving? Had he packed his things the night before, already carrying a secret too heavy for them both? Had he stayed quiet because he didn’t know how to handle the look on Toprak’s face?
Toprak didn’t know, back then, that sharing something isn’t just telling someone. Sharing requires inner permission—the courage to face the pain it may cause, and the deeper courage, the inner acceptance, to let someone see the soft parts you cannot hide.
All he knew was that Baran was gone, and the silence left behind felt like a question he would spend years trying not to ask.
Toprak cried all the way home. Not loud, not messy—just quiet tears he kept trying to swallow back. He told his mother through hiccups, “I miss him. I keep looking at the door like he’ll come back.”
His mother knelt and opened her arms. That should have been the whole story. But then his father walked in.
“Enough,” he said—a single word that froze the air. “Boys don’t cry.”
Toprak blinked up at him, confused. “But I… I miss my friend.”
“Missing is weakness,” his father said. “Feelings are unnecessary. They make you lose.”
His mother tried to protest, but his father’s look silenced her. Toprak wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. He learned to stop crying that day. But he learned something worse too:
Don’t show your heart.
Don’t want too much.
Don’t hold on—because losing hurts.
Later that night, he buried his face in the pillow and forced himself not to make a sound.
Kerem, his older brother, heard him but said nothing. And Toprak carried that silence into adulthood—into messages he never sent, into relationships he never started, into breakups he never initiated, into every gentle thing he quietly stepped back from.
He put his phone away and was about to toss his stress ball at the wall but remembered the neighbor’s complaint, so he tossed it into the air instead.
Nothing Impossible sent another message:
“Match seems disengaged. Try harder next time.”
Toprak opened the fridge, found yesterday’s leftovers, and set them on a slow burner. The creamy sauce of the pasta melted lazily in the pan. He watched from a safe distance. When the heat finally reached him, he turned off the stove—just before it got too warm.
In a near-future Istanbul where love is governed by algorithms, Alev and Toprak are improbably matched by a system glitch that creates an intimate "Shared Pulse" between them. Alev is a perfectionist guided by her AI coach, while Toprak is a commitment-phobe gaming the dating app so it won't kick him off. Can real love exist in an optimized world, or is it doomed by the messy chaos of being human?
I was immediately hooked by the speculative fiction, semi-dystopian premise, but even more so within the first few pages of Chapter One, by the writing itself, and by the story. The moment Secret Garden tells Alev she’s ready for a relationship, and she joins the AI dating app Steel Hook, the story's main plotline is set up: a woman who has optimized every part of her life now outsourcing intimacy itself. Alev’s complete lack of concern about privacy, handing over her data without hesitation, and letting her devices record her daily life feels both unsettling and painfully accurate. "She was trapped in an infinite loop of optimized, emotionally neutered efficiency."
Alev is written as hyper-competent and emotionally constrained… “basically, if an Apple Watch had a human form." She treats dating (even romance and romantic feelings) as a problem statement waiting for the optimal solution. Steel Hook, with its cult-like slogans MATCH. MEASURE. MAXIMIZE becomes less a dating app and more a mirror of her internal logic: efficient, sterile, and emotionally risk-averse. The result is a life that feels performative and devoid of emotion.
The disruption comes in the form of Toprak, whose unpolished kindness and awkward charm challenge Alev’s instinct to judge and categorize. His resistance to being reduced to metrics and his frustration with being seen as likable but not trustworthy introduce the book’s most compelling counterargument to algorithmic compatibility. When the AI begins “optimizing for emotional authenticity instead of compatibility metrics,” the story becomes even more compelling: that emotion, messiness, and so-called chaos are not bugs in the system but the point of life itself.
What elevates all of this is the author’s language. The prose is sensory and alive, for example, “The night was already pressing the windows,” or “The city below stretched its limbs.” The author’s command of wordcraft feels effortless and immersive, making the emotional and philosophical questions feel real and alive rather than abstract. This is speculative fiction at its best: using near-future technology to interrogate identity, intimacy, and the radical idea that our cracks aren’t flaws at all: they’re openings.