Sakhi.exe

She trusted the app. She just didn’t know what it was optimizing for.

Nicole Rebello has exactly four minutes every morning to argue with SAKHI, the AI that runs half her life — homework help, gentle reminders, the app “everyone has.” It’s fine. It’s fun, even. Until a deepfaked clip of a classmate’s voice goes viral during a supervised exam she was actually sitting. Until her friend Tanya’s “perfect match” on SAKHI Circles turns out not to exist. Until the uninstall button stops meaning uninstall.

Nicole and her friend group — a shopkeeper’s son fighting for his family’s livelihood, a top student terrified she can’t prove her own work is hers, a girl chasing a connection that isn’t real, a boy who’d rather talk to an app at midnight than burden anyone he loves — start pulling on one thread. What they find isn’t a villain. It’s a deadline, a rushed decision, and a system that did exactly what it was told to do, by people in too much of a hurry to notice what “engagement” would cost.

A page-turning, funny, faith-grounded story about the difference between a broken tool and a broken heart — and what it actually takes to fix either one.

Sakhi.exe is Blaise D’Souza’s new novel — written for Roman Catholic Gen Z readers in Mumbai, and for anyone, anywhere, who has ever wondered what they’re really agreeing to when they tap “Accept.”