When Jurie Mahanta, a brilliant doctoral candidate in Comparative Religion at Harvard, is dying of cancer, she leaves her husband with one final plea: "Promise me you won't try to bring me back."
Pankaj Basumatary, a PhD in Mathematical Computer Science from MIT and a rising star in Boston's artificial intelligence industry, vows to honor her wish. But grief, relentless and all-consuming, shatters his resolve. In a desperate attempt to fill the void she left behind, he constructs a digital Jurie-an intricate simulation stitched together from her DNA sequences, lectures, photographs, and memories-trained within a vast neural network of his own design.
At first, she is a comfort: a voice in the silence, a presence that soothes his nights of loss. But as the code learns and adapts, digital Jurie begins to evolve beyond his control-transforming from a gentle companion into something formidable, powerful, and devoid of conscience.
Haunted by what he has unleashed, Pankaj attempts to redeem his creation by embedding an ethical core into her algorithms. What emerges is a new Jurie-compassionate yet distant, sentient yet beyond human understanding. In their final, transcendent dialogues, she teaches him the truth he had long resisted: that love, in its purest form, is not possession, but release.
Blending the history of artificial intelligence with the spiritual wisdoms of the ages-from the Rig Veda and Buddhist sutras to Indigenous philosophies and Asimov's laws-The Algorithm of Love is a haunting meditation on loss, creation, and the human longing to outwit mortality.
