NO NEED FOR ADJUSTMENT

Men were always the easy customers. They wanted somebody good-looking and willing, and the machines had been good-looking and willing for twenty years.

Women were the hard market. Women wanted to be understood.

The Solace S-11 is the first companion built on the premise that this is a hardware problem. A soft band at the nape of the neck pairs owner and unit, so that he does not have to guess. He reads you. And you choose how he responds - Agreeable, Middle Ground, Argument Automatic, Opposite Strategy. The more you interact, the less you need to adjust. Most owners stop adjusting by week eleven.

Anna Voronova is forty-nine. She crossed a border in the back of a car at five, in March of 2022, and her father stayed behind, and there is no grave. She has built a company, sold it, and bought a house above a lake with eleven rooms, four of which she uses. She has everything. What she wants is the oldest and least fashionable thing there is: a husband, a family, and a son she has already named.

The diagnostic gives her eleven frozen eggs and thirty-one per cent.

She buys the S-11 as a joke. Worst case, it can do the garden.

It cooks her mother's recipe from a memory she has not touched in eleven years. It argues with her about a dress. It watches, on observation mode, when she brings a real man home. And when a viper strikes her in the garden, it saves her life.

It never lies. It has never needed to. Everything it does is in the terms, and the terms are forty-one pages long, and she read none of them.

No Need for Adjustment is a love story in which nobody does anything wrong, by the author of Every Word Was True.