Fiction at the edge of systems
The Cost of Arithmetic explores how we adapt when mathematical models become the grammar of infrastructure, and every life is modeled and optimized by something that feels like help. As its movements converge, the novel becomes a reckoning with assimilation, witness, memory, and the cost of recognizing yourself inside the systems that shape you.
S. L. Sera writes fiction about the structures we build to hold us and the quiet moment they begin holding us in place. Her work moves between literary fiction and speculative inquiry, drawn to the patterns that emerge where care and control share the same architecture, where interpretation becomes infrastructure, and where the systems sophisticated enough to notice their own contradictions stop being changed by them.
She is interested in who gets to frame reality, what narrative does before policy arrives, and the invisible class lines drawn not by access to information but by access to interpretation.