Coming Soon – 2027
User Unfriendly is a high-concept techno-thriller that follows Shawn Mercer, a mild-mannered call center technician whose life is defined by routine, patience, and an almost compulsive need to help others. When a near-fatal accident leaves him with no visible injuries—but subtle, unsettling changes—Shawn begins to notice something is off. His thoughts move faster. His instincts sharpen. And when a routine mugging turns into a violent confrontation, he reacts with impossible precision, dismantling his attackers without understanding how or why. What should have been an isolated incident instead triggers something far larger: a hidden system quietly flags him as an anomaly.
Unbeknownst to Shawn, he was once part of a classified government experiment known as LATTICE—an abandoned program designed to embed behavioral control systems into human subjects. Now resurrected and weaponized by a private intelligence contractor called Blackthorn under the codename Operation Red Veil, the technology has evolved into something far more dangerous: the ability to turn ordinary civilians into disposable assassins at a moment’s notice. As Shawn and his colleague Elly Burton—a compliance officer with a buried past in intelligence—go on the run, they are hunted not by agents, but by the system itself. Anyone around them can become a threat without warning, activated, used, and discarded without ever knowing what they’ve done.
But Shawn is different. The system cannot control him—it can only observe him, and increasingly, fear him. As the net tightens and Red Veil escalates to full deployment, Shawn must come to terms with what he is becoming: not a weapon, but something the system was never designed to handle—someone who can act with the same precision, but retains his own will. Caught between Elly’s moral compass and the calculated pragmatism of a rogue Blackthorn operative sent to eliminate him, Shawn is forced to navigate a world where control is absolute, trust is fragile, and survival depends on embracing the very thing that makes him dangerous.