In a near-future world where automation has perfected survival but drained life of meaning, one man tries to rekindle belief—not in gods, but in each other. Dr. Gabriel Sloane, a behavioral scientist and lapsed preacher’s son, once taught that empathy could be reverse-engineered. When an AI replica of himself begins teaching his lectures better than he ever could, his career collapses—and with it, his faith in human purpose. Out of humiliation and curiosity, he launches a quiet experiment in moral psychology: a study called SALVĒ , short for Society for the Advancement of Living Values & Empathy. What begins as data collection becomes something stranger. In candle-lit offices and forgotten coworking spaces, people gather to practice attention as a form of prayer. A nurse brings her patients. A journalist starts filming. A programmer helps shape the ritual language. Soon the experiment has a rhythm, a chant, and then a following. Gabe calls it behavioral science. The world calls it salvation. As the movement spreads, his small circle—Mara, the skeptical strategist; Clara, the believer who heals without statistics; Luis, the rational friend holding the line—struggles to keep SALVĒ from hardening into the very kind of faith it meant to study. What began as a mirror for empathy becomes a screen for power. Rivals emerge, sermons go viral, and believers quote his early jokes as scripture. Across cities grown silent under the hum of perfect systems, people begin to whisper the word salve —part greeting, part hope. The chant travels faster than he can measure or control. And somewhere between experiment and awakening, Gabe must decide whether he’s still the observer or has become the subject of his own design. Told with the precision of science and the cadence of a sermon, Make Believe is a literary thriller about persuasion, loneliness, and the fragile architecture of meaning in an age of automation. It asks what happens when a culture that has forgotten faith begins to rediscover it—through data, through desire, and through the dangerous beauty of belief itself. Blending cognitive psychology, moral philosophy, and quiet humanism, Alan Tien’s near future science fiction novel traces a world learning to feel again. “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” — Simone Weil Fans of Iain M. Banks , Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun , and Ted Chiang will find in Make Believe a story of quiet apocalypse and hard-won grace—where the end of work gives rise to the work of being human again.