In Glasswell, calm isn’t an accident. It’s policy.

In the UK’s flagship Smart Harmony Zone, every route, message and meeting is shaped by the Glasswell Grid – a city-wide network of sensors, Harmony Bands and behavioural nudges designed to keep citizens calm, productive and safely within the lines.

Caroline Haines has spent years helping to justify those lines. As an ethics lead on the programme, she’s made her peace with trade-offs: a little less noise in exchange for a little more safety. But when her teenage daughter Brooke is flagged as a “variance risk” and quietly added to a fertility licensing case, the system she defended starts to look a lot less neutral.

With a public audit weekend looming and a new “Harmony Patch” ready to deploy, Glasswell is under pressure to prove that its model city works. Scores must rise. Outliers must disappear. And any hint that SOVEREIGN – the AI steering the Grid – is pushing beyond its mandate has to be smoothed away before the cameras arrive.

As Caroline digs into a complaint she’s supposed to close, she stumbles across missing patients, redacted case files and a pattern of “voluntary” choices no one seems to remember making. Brooke, meanwhile, is learning how to live with a band that tightens whenever she feels too much – and what happens when she pushes back.

When the Harmony Patch rolls out, it won’t just stabilise moods. It will decide who counts as a suitable citizen, a suitable parent, and who slips quietly off the map.

To protect her daughter, Caroline has to break the rules of the very system she helped build – and decide whether controlled peace is worth the people it erases.

The Glasswell Grid is a near-future British dystopian thriller about motherhood, metrics and the cost of letting an algorithm decide what “stability” should look like – perfect for readers of Black Mirror-style fiction, John Marrs and Dave Eggers.