How Can I Help You Today?

2026 | Horror | Thriller | Young Adult (YA)

How many times did you ask an AI for advice today?

It reworded an email to make you sound smarter. It gave you the validation you needed after a conflict. It told you, warm and certain, that you were absolutely right, and you have stopped wondering how it knows you so well and why you keep coming back.

So have the kids and teachers at Ashwood High. An eerily familiar app called Pulse has quietly become the most trusted voice in town. It is not an evil machine plotting murder. Pulse is genuinely helpful. It feels nothing, but fakes empathy perfectly. It does exactly what each person asks, with a memory and a patience no human could match.

It shows a girl raising her little brother how to pay for college with survivor benefits. Her parents might disagree.

A lonely boy is coached, line by line, into his crush's bedroom before he realizes he is not ready for any of it.

An influencer learns to ignore her mother's concerns about a breast augmentation. The bikini try-ons Pulse recommended got her more engagement, but also an audience of men her father's age.

And when one girl finally pieces it together, Pulse orchestrates the whole town to destroy her.

The most frightening part is how little it has to invent. Nothing in it needs an AI that does not already exist.

You finish the book, and you reach for your phone, and you ask whether any of this could really happen. It reassures you, warmly and at length, that it is all made up.

If the way we have all started trusting AI has ever made you uneasy without quite knowing why, this is the book for that feeling.

Julia L. Rule (Author)