A small neural device called Catalyst amplifies whatever cognitive ability is most developed in its user. The first trial cohorts are adolescents, because adolescent brains integrate the device more readily than adult ones. Twenty-four teenagers are selected for the program at the Neurovia Institute. The institution running the trial knows more than it discloses. The device begins acting autonomously in ways nobody designed.
I have been writing this serially for the past few months and am now twenty-three chapters in. I wanted to share it here because the questions it sits with: what meaningful consent looks like under uncertainty, what happens when an enhancement system begins making unauthorized decisions about the person it is enhancing, what it costs to discover that your own gifts have been turned up to a resolution you cannot turn off. These are questions I think this community is more equipped to engage with than most.
A few things to be upfront about.
This is a coming-of-age novel as much as it is a novel of ideas. The cohort members are teenagers and the book stays inside their experience; their families, rivalries, friendships and first loves. If you want pure ratfic where the protagonist breaks the world through superior reasoning, this is not that. If you want a novel where the characters actually think about their situations, where the institutional figures genuinely deliberate, where our world is rapidly advancing to and will need to answer these questions, you may find something here.
The institutional thread is the most rationalist-coded part of the book. The novel takes seriously the question of how a research institute populated by careful, intelligent, morally invested professionals can collectively authorize something that none of them individually believes is fully safe. There is a chapter on whether to expand the trial after concerning data has emerged. The committee includes a regulatory ethicist who votes against, a cognitive integration scientist who insists on independent oversight, a clinical psychologist who is beginning to operate outside the institution she works for, and a researcher who is running a different experiment than the one filed with the FDA. They argue. They reach a decision. Nobody is satisfied. The decision proceeds anyway.
The novel does not resolve its central questions. It wrestles with them and invites you to.
If this sounds like something you would read, the site is here: https://www.neuro-catalyst.com/
I am genuinely interested in feedback from this community, especially on whether the institutional and capability dynamics feel rigorous enough to land for rationalist readers, or whether they read as window dressing on a literary novel. I am also interested in whether the coming-of-age frame succeeds in carrying the weightier questions or whether it dilutes them. Honest reactions appreciated.