BOUNDED RATIONALITY

Short Description

Bounded Rationality begins one week after the devastating events of The Black Swan Event. Although corporate leaders attempt to restore the appearance of normalcy, executives, wealthy patricians, Intercorpex officials, security forces, and Liberteum are all pursuing competing agendas.

Chief Inspector Zyree continues investigating Rykos while a kidnapping, the murders of three wealthy patricians, and a massive new attack suggest that the crisis threatening corporate society is far from over. Meanwhile, internal divisions within Liberteum threaten the resistance just as it prepares the second phase of its Archimedes plan.

Genre

Bounded Rationality is a dystopian political thriller incorporating military-thriller, conspiracy, speculative-fiction, and action elements.

The novel expands the political and institutional struggle introduced in The Black Swan Event while placing greater emphasis on investigations, shifting alliances, internal political conflict, and the escalating confrontation between corporate security forces and Liberteum.

Inspiration

Bounded Rationality grew from the idea that people must often make enormous decisions with limited information. In a crisis, no one possesses the complete truth. Political leaders, corporate institutions, resistance movements, and ordinary citizens act on fragments of evidence shaped by fear, loyalty, ambition, and self-interest. I wanted to explore how choices that appear rational from one perspective can seem reckless—or even unforgivable—from another.

The novel also develops one of the central ideas running through the America, Inc. Saga: individuals and institutions rarely see themselves as villains. Most believe their actions are necessary. Those in power justify surveillance and control as the price of security, while those resisting the system accept deception and violence as the cost of freedom. Between them are people forced to decide whom to trust when competing versions of the truth are equally persuasive.

At its heart, Bounded Rationality explores political power, loyalty, betrayal, institutional self-preservation, and the difficulty of making sound decisions when every available choice carries consequences. The characters are not simply choosing between right and wrong. They are choosing among imperfect options without knowing which decision will save their world—and which might destroy it.

Behind the Book: Bounded Rationality

• The title comes from the idea that people must make decisions with limited information, limited time, and their own imperfect understanding of the world. I wanted every novel to have a title that is drawn from the business world.

• I wanted to explore what happens when intelligent people make perfectly reasonable choices that still lead to disastrous consequences. Sometimes, that’s how life is.

• The novel expands the world introduced in The Black Swan Event and reveals that the struggle for America, Inc. is much larger than Rykos originally understood. Youth look at the world differently than adults, and I thought it was important to show that.

• One of the central questions is whether anyone can make a genuinely free choice when corporations control the economy, the government, and the flow of information. Someone could make the same argument about governments today.

• The conflict between the Board and the CEO demonstrates that even the most powerful people in the world operate under constraints.

• I wanted the corporate power structure to feel complicated. Removing one leader would not automatically repair a system designed to protect itself.

• Rykos must begin considering the consequences of his actions beyond his own survival. That evolution is essential to his journey through the series.

• The relationship between Rykos and Michele continues to develop against circumstances that make an ordinary relationship almost impossible. This was never envisioned as a love story. Will they end up together at the end of this saga? Hmm…

• The novel examines how people justify compromises by convincing themselves that they had no better option.

• Bounded Rationality is ultimately about the limits of human judgment—and the danger of assuming that powerful people know more than everyone else. Does that read as something familiar?