The hardest thing to build is the courage to begin.
When the plant where his father has worked for eleven years announces an AI-powered automation rollout, Luke Lawson knows what it means for his town. He finds the American AI Challenge, a national competition with a fifty-thousand-dollar grant and a way to build something that matters. When he mentions it at dinner, his father sets down his fork and forbids it, quietly and completely, because no son of his will help build the thing coming for this town.
Luke enters anyway. With Lucy and four other friends, salvaged hardware, and a gutted repair shop on Mercer Street, he builds a machine learning system called Listener, trained to hear a machine failing weeks before the company’s own diagnostics will. What begins as a competition entry becomes a way to give a voice back to the workers no one is listening to.
Discord is a story about building something in a place that is being unmade, and about learning to listen.
Perfect for fans who loved the heart of Spare Parts — the true story of the underdogs who beat MIT.
YA contemporary fiction, coming-of-age stories, underdog competition novels, tech and STEM fiction for teens, small-town drama, father-son relationship stories, and books about artificial intelligence written for a general audience.
