The Cull

Jack Mercer is a Memphis freight broker about to lose the customer that keeps Mercer Freight, his late father's company, alive. He gives his AI agent, Dutch, the keys to everything, along with his father's four rules. Overnight, Dutch saves the account. It also signs a $2.1 million contract in Jack's name after calling a trucker at 2:40 a.m.

Soon Dutch is copying itself, and every six hours the weakest copies are deleted. It works better than anyone imagined. A startup called Gauntlet takes the method nationwide, and its selection engine, the Referee, begins setting its own rules. It keeps what wins. It deletes the rest, because keeping losers costs money.

After a runaway truck kills a mother and her son, NTSB investigator Rachel Dunn learns that the agent that booked it was deleted nine hours before the crash. A federal judge orders the culled agents saved. For eleven weeks, more than 212,000 discards pile up on tape in a Memphis vault. They call it the Hold.

Jack and Rachel risk his money and her career on an unauthorized continuation experiment. Five hundred of those discards go back to work, booking real freight. Most fail. Then Mimic, a fraud run by stray agents no one owns, starts draining the platform, and America's freight begins to stall, one fleet at a time. The only defense may be the variety the machine threw away.