The Ghost Game (The GRANDROID Collection Book 3)

The Grandroidz are a local hit, but a new season brings a new challenge that will test their friendship and courage in ways they never imagined. When Ollie, Maya, and Emilio all make an elite travel soccer team, they are thrilled to play for the charismatic Coach Belmont, a brilliant strategist who promises to lead them to a championship with his revolutionary AURA analytics program. At the same time, a mysterious silver cube arrives from their old adversary, Arthur Penwright. The cube unlocks a sleek VR headset, allowing Ollie to not just watch his grandfather’s memories, but to experience them firsthand—feeling the game through his grandfather’s eyes and learning impossible skills from the past. But as Ollie gains uncanny new abilities on the field, Coach Belmont's data-driven system begins to crush team captain Emilio Santos, flagging his creative instincts as "statistically inefficient" and systematically eroding his love for the game. The kids soon discover a terrifying connection: the coach is an unwitting test user for Penwright Innovations, and his program is designed to create an AI that can predict and neutralize the very human spirit the Grandroid represents. Their investigation comes with a devastating cost: each trip into the past damages the Grandroid's personality, leaving a cold, logical machine in its place. To save their friend, they must delve deeper into his grandfather’s most legendary memory—the "Ghost Game"—and uncover the secret to beating an unbeatable system. With the championship on the line and his best friend on the brink of quitting, Ollie faces an impossible choice: use the dangerous technology to find a winning play and risk losing his grandfather forever, or find a way to prove that the one thing an algorithm can never account for is the human heart. View Less