Local Maximum — The Selection Problem, Book One

Read the complete first novel free

Local Maximum by M. R. Vey is Book One of The Selection Problem: 30 chapters and an epilogue, approximately 105,000 words. Read in your browser or download the full EPUB below. This is the complete novel, not a sample.

Eli Mercer can choose a successful outcome. He cannot make it a good idea.

After a funding rejection, an underfunded researcher takes his neural experiment somewhere no review panel would approve. It works. A carefully defined result can become the result that happens—within limits he is only beginning to understand.

Better experiments become better days. Better days become easy money. But other people keep records, remember promises and suffer consequences that fall outside the question Eli asked.

As an investigator begins to connect those ordinary traces, he discovers that winning tomorrow is no protection against the life he is building.

Local Maximum opens a complete science-fiction trilogy about a useful power, a limited horizon and the people left outside the plan. For adult readers who enjoy ideas, moral consequences and slowly tightening institutional pressure.

Continue the trilogy

Books Two and Three are paid ebooks; read them in order. Prices and availability depend on your marketplace.

• Book Two — Adversarial Agent: Amazon UK · Amazon US
• Book Three — Terminal Value: Amazon UK · Amazon US

There is no obligation to buy anything to read this complete first novel.

Edition information

For adult readers. Content includes self-experimentation, neurological injury, coercion, crime, confinement and strained relationships.

AI disclosure: the novel includes AI-generated prose and subsequent revision. The cover and publishing code were created with AI tools. This is fixed fiction, not a live chatbot. Technical checks are not a claim of independent human proofreading.

Comments are open for reader feedback. Free access does not grant redistribution rights.

Publication verification: this is an authorised M. R. Vey release. The Royal Road account Shaderhoth is authorised to publish Local Maximum as part of The Selection Problem.