Error in the Game

The Hypothesis: In the cold, clinical world of the University of London's Social Sciences department, Dr. Sebastian Liu believes in one absolute truth: Human beings are selfish machines. As the department's rising star in Evolutionary Egoism, he views altruism as a biological lie and love as a chemical transaction. He lives his life by the data-cold, efficient, and perfectly controlled.

The Variable: Enter Sooyeon Park. Brilliant, stubborn, and desperate to save her career, the Korean PhD candidate arrives in London with a thesis that contradicts everything Sebastian stands for. She believes in moral plasticity-that people can learn to be good. She is the idealist to his cynic, the fire to his ice, and the only person in the department brave enough to look him in the eye and tell him he's wrong.

The Experiment: Forced together as supervisor and student, their academic rivalry quickly bleeds into a dangerous obsession. Sebastian intends to break her spirit and dismantle her research piece by piece. But in the claustrophobic heat of the basement lab and the silence of the apartment building where they are unknowingly neighbors, the data begins to skew.

Sebastian has a picture-perfect girlfriend and a reputation to protect. Sooyeon has a grant to lose. But every argument turns into foreplay, and every glare masks a primal hunger that defies logic.

As the lines between professional hate and visceral want blur, Sebastian realizes he's facing the one thing his algorithms never predicted: a variable he can't control.

He wants to prove her wrong. She wants to prove him human. Neither of them calculated the cost of winning.